Skip to main content
Main

Roast Rabbit

Roast rabbit stuffed with sausage, bread crumbs, and butter, served with brown gravy, red‑currant jelly, and lemon slices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Bread and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Roast Rabbit

Oven, in the book's wordsA good oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the rabbit

  1. Empty, skin, wash the rabbit thoroughly, and wipe it dry.

  2. Line the inside with sausage meat and seasoned bread crumbs.

  3. Sew the stuffing inside and skewer the head back between the shoulders.

  4. Cut off the fore-joints of the shoulders and legs, bring them close to the body, and secure with a skewer.

Roast and serve

  1. Wrap the rabbit in buttered paper and baste it well.

  2. A few minutes before it is done, remove the paper, flour it, and let it brown.

  3. Cook for about 45 minutes.

  4. Remove the skewers and serve with brown gravy and red-currant jelly.

  5. Garnish with slices of 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. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

  2. Rabbit + meattop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together315 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: acetaldehyde (pungent, ethereal).

  5. Meat + breadtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,924 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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 cut of meat that is roasted whole and carved for serving.
Sausage meat
Fills the cavity, adding richness and moisture as the rabbit roasts.
Bread crumbs
Bind the stuffing and soak up juices, keeping the filling moist.
Butter
Enriches the wrapped rabbit and helps the flour brown the surface.
Flour
Dusted on the surface near the end, it helps the skin brown and crisp.

The step that matters

Remove the paper and let it brown. Timing matters: removing the buttered paper too early leaves the surface pale, while leaving it on too long prevents browning. Flouring just before the end lets the surface brown and crisp in the dry heat of the oven.

Swap the currant

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

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Coconutfits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against rabbit, meat, bread, butter, flour, lemon. 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.

You might also like

Brown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesLemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesWhite BreadWhite Bread80 recipesBread OmeletteBread Omelette60 recipes