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Rabbit Boiled- Liver Sauce

A rabbit boiled and served with a sauce made from liver, butter, pepper, salt, and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Rabbit Boiled- Liver Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the rabbit

  1. Truss the rabbit and cover it with hot water.

  2. Cook gently for about 45 minutes if medium-sized.

Make the liver sauce

  1. In another pot, boil the liver for 10 minutes.

  2. Mince the liver very fine and return it to the boiling water.

  3. Season with butter, pepper, and salt.

  4. Thicken the sauce with flour and pour it over the rabbit.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: acetaldehyde (pungent, ethereal).

  3. Rabbit + livertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together233 recipes

    Shared aroma: geraniol (rose, geranium).

  4. Rabbit + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,448 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Rabbit + peppertop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,334 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-pentylpyridine (fat).

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 main cooked meat that the sauce is served over.
Liver
Its minced flesh dissolves into the cooking liquid, giving the sauce body and a rich, savoury flavour.
Butter
Adds fat, which gives the sauce a smooth, rounded mouthfeel and carries flavour.
Flour
Starch that thickens the liquid into a sauce as it heats.

The step that matters

Thicken the sauce with flour. Flour must be stirred in so it disperses evenly; when heated, its starch swells and thickens the liquid. Added in clumps, it stays lumpy and the sauce turns gritty.

“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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