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Fried Rabbit

Fried rabbit is a dish of rabbit pieces boiled with onion and salt, then fried and served with a flour‑based gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 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 ↓

Fried Rabbit

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the rabbit

  1. Select young rabbits and cut them into pieces, discarding the ribs with little meat.

  2. Boil the rabbit pieces in water with the onion and salt until tender.

  3. Discard the broth and onion to remove any strong taste.

Fry and make gravy

  1. Fry the tender rabbit pieces in butter or lard until golden.

  2. In a separate pan, make a gravy by rubbing flour into butter, adding hot water, and stirring until thickened.

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 + oniontop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,292 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

    Shared aroma: acetaldehyde (pungent, ethereal).

  4. Onion + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together42,912 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

Young rabbits
Provide the main meat, which becomes tender after boiling and browns when fried.
Butter or lard
Conducts heat for frying and adds fat that browns the rabbit pieces golden.
Flour
Thickens the gravy when rubbed into fat and cooked with hot water.

The step that matters

Boil until tender before frying. Rabbit is lean and can turn tough or dry if fried raw or undercooked. Boiling first softens the connective tissue so the pieces are tender when they later brown in fat.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Arrowrootfits better
  3. Chivefits better
  4. Onionthe original

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