Skip to main content
Main

To Roast Hare or Rabbit

Roasted rabbit or hare served with gravy, melted butter, and currant jelly sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Butter and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

To Roast Hare or Rabbit

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash the rabbit well and soak it in water for 1-2 hours.

  2. Stuff the rabbit with a flavorful stuffing and sew it up.

Roast

  1. Baste with milk until half cooked, then switch to basting with butter.

  2. If blood has settled in the neck, soak that part in warm water.

  3. Keep the hare at a distance from the fire initially.

Serve

  1. Serve with froth, rich gravy, melted butter, and currant jelly sauce.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Rabbit + oniontop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,292 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  3. Rabbit + flourtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,067 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetaldehyde (pungent, ethereal).

  4. Rabbit + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together626 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Onion + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together42,912 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Milk (in the method)
Basting with milk adds milk sugars and proteins that help the surface brown during roasting.
Butter
Basting with butter adds fat and moisture, enriching the surface and encouraging golden browning.

The step that matters

Keep the rabbit at a distance from the fire initially. Early strong heat cooks the outside before the centre is done and can scorch the milk sugars. Gentle distance lets the meat cook through evenly before browning.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (rabbit, lemon, egg, butter, flour):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Asparagusfits better
  3. Arrowrootfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against rabbit, lemon, egg, butter, flour. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

More roasted rabbit recipes

with Bacon 3 See all 59 →

You might also like

Lemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesRabbit PattiesRabbit Patties6 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipes