Name: Baked Rabbit Pie
Ingredients: 1 rabbit, prepared as for stewing; meat pie paste

Why it works: Rabbit and meat work together. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 315 recipes. Both carry 1-octen-3-ol, which smells mushroom, earthy. The science ↓

Baked Rabbit Pie

Ingredients

1 rabbit, prepared as for stewing
meat pie paste

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

Prepare the rabbit as you would for stewing.
Transfer the rabbit to a baking dish.

Bake and serve

Cover the rabbit with meat pie paste.
Bake at 400°F (200°C) for 30 minutes.
Serve hot.

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.

Rabbit + meattop 12% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together315 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Rabbit: Provides the main meat, which becomes tender as it cooks under the pastry.
Meat pie paste: Forms a crust that traps heat and moisture around the rabbit and browns in the oven.

“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.