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Fried Rabbit

Fried rabbit pieces coated in egg and breadcrumbs, pan‑fried and served with a butter‑flour‑milk sauce and lemon garnish.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Fried Rabbit

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the rabbit

  1. Boil the rabbit in water for 10 minutes.

  2. Drain the rabbit and let it cool.

  3. Cut the rabbit into joints.

Coat and fry

  1. Dip each joint in beaten egg.

  2. Coat each joint with bread crumbs.

  3. Season the coated joints with salt and pepper.

  4. Fry the rabbit pieces in a mixture of butter and sweet lard over moderate heat until browned on both sides.

  5. Remove the rabbit from the pan.

Make the sauce and serve

  1. Thicken the remaining fat with flour.

  2. Stir in the milk or cream.

  3. Bring the sauce to a boil.

  4. Pour the sauce over the fried rabbit.

  5. Serve hot, garnished with sliced lemon.

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. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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

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

  3. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  4. Bread + milktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  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
Provides the meat that is cooked through by boiling, then browned by frying.
Beaten eggs
Act as a binder so the bread crumbs adhere to each joint.
Fine bread crumbs
Form a crisp, golden coating that browns during frying.
Flour
Thickens the pan fat into a smooth sauce when stirred in.
Milk or cream
Adds moisture and richness to the sauce, mellowing its flavor.

The step that matters

Fry the coated rabbit over moderate heat. Moderate heat lets the crumb coating brown gradually and the joints cook through without the crust scorching. Too high a heat burns the coating before the meat is heated through.

“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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