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Rabbit Pie

A savory pie made with rabbit, onion, and a biscuit crust.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Onion and biscuit work together. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 428 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Rabbit Pie

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the rabbit

  1. Clean the rabbits and cover them with boiling water.

  2. Add the chopped onion and season with salt and pepper.

  3. Simmer slowly until tender.

Assemble and bake

  1. Remove the bones from the rabbits and place the meat in a baking dish.

  2. Thicken the gravy with flour and pour it over the meat.

  3. Cover with rich biscuit crust and bake at 400°F (200°C) for 30 minutes.

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. Onion + biscuittop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together428 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Flour + biscuittop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together889 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

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

  4. Pepper + biscuittop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together841 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  5. Rabbit + biscuittop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together21 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

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

What each ingredient does

Rabbits
Provide the main meat, which becomes tender through slow simmering.
Flour
Thickens the cooking liquid into a gravy that binds the filling.
Onion
Adds aromatic sweetness and savory depth to the gravy.
Rich biscuit crust
Forms a rich, golden topping that seals and bakes over the filling.

The step that matters

Simmer slowly until tender. Rabbit is lean and can turn tough if cooked too fast or too hot. A slow simmer breaks down connective tissue gradually, so the meat becomes tender and easy to remove from the bones before baking.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (rabbit, pepper, flour, biscuit):

  1. Arrowrootfits better
  2. Spinachfits better
  3. Turnipfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against rabbit, pepper, flour, biscuit. 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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