Name: Rabbit Pie
Ingredients: 1 rabbit, cleaned and cut up like chicken; 2 tablespoons butter; ¼ teaspoon black pepper; ¼ teaspoon coarse sea salt; pie crust for lining and covering the pie

Why it works: Rabbit and chicken work together. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 339 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Rabbit Pie

Ingredients

1 rabbit, cleaned and cut up like chicken
2 tablespoons butter
¼ teaspoon black pepper
¼ teaspoon coarse sea salt
pie crust for lining and covering the pie

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 filling

Stew the rabbit pieces until tender.
Thicken the gravy from the stew and add butter, pepper, and salt.

Assemble and bake

Line a deep pan with pie crust.
Pour the gravy over the rabbit in the pan and cover with another crust.
Bake at 400°F (200°C) for about 20 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.

Rabbit + chickentop 9% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together339 recipes

Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).
Rabbit + buttertop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,448 recipes

Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).
Chicken + buttertop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together13,902 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).
Chicken + peppertop 16% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together19,958 recipes

Shared aroma: piperonal (bitter, coconut).
Rabbit + peppertop 18% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,334 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-pentylpyridine (fat).

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 through slow stewing.
Butter: Adds richness and fat to the gravy, giving it a smoother mouthfeel.
Pie crust: Forms the pastry lining and top that enclose the filling and brown 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.