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Roast Rabbit

A rabbit stuffed with minced pork, heart, liver, and breadcrumbs, roasted and served with a lemon‑onion butter gravy and currant jelly.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Rabbit and pork work together. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 832 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Roast Rabbit

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Clean, wash, and soak the rabbit in slightly salted water for 1.5 hours, changing the water once.

  2. Have your butcher skin the rabbit for you.

  3. Parboil the heart and liver, chop finely, and mix with minced fat pork.

  4. Make a stuffing with seasoned bread crumbs and the minced meat.

  5. Stuff the rabbit and sew it up.

  6. Rub the rabbit with butter.

Roast

  1. Roast the rabbit, basting with butter and water until the gravy flows freely.

  2. Switch to basting with the drippings.

  3. Dredge the rabbit with flour a few minutes before removing from the oven.

  4. Add butter to the flour mixture.

Make the gravy and serve

  1. Place the rabbit in a hot dish, add lemon juice, minced onion, butter, and thicken the gravy with browned flour.

  2. Bring the gravy to a boil.

  3. Serve in a tureen or boat.

  4. Garnish the rabbit with sliced lemon and a dot of currant jelly in the center of each slice.

  5. Remove the head before serving.

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. Rabbit + porktop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together832 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  2. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Liver + porktop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,606 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-nonanal (fatty, waxy).

  4. Pork + oniontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,214 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

Rabbit
Is the main meat, cooked whole so it stays moist while roasting.
Heart and liver
Add rich, deep flavour to the stuffing when minced with fat pork.
Fat pork
Adds fat to the stuffing, keeping the lean meats moist as they cook.
Bread crumbs
Soak up juices and give the stuffing a soft, cohesive texture.
Flour
Browns in the drippings and thickens the gravy.
Butter
Adds fat for basting and richness, helping the rabbit brown.

The step that matters

Basting the rabbit while it roasts. Rabbit is very lean, so it dries out easily. Regular basting with fat and juices keeps the surface moist and helps it brown evenly.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (rabbit, liver, pork, bread, butter, flour, onion):

  1. Applefits better
  2. Coconutfits about as well
  3. Avocadofits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against rabbit, liver, pork, bread, butter, flour, onion. 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.

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