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Fried Rabbit

A rabbit dish where the meat is boiled, breaded, fried, and served with a butter‑lard sauce and lemon garnish.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Fried Rabbit

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Boil the rabbit in water for 10 minutes, then drain and let it cool.

  2. Cut the rabbit into joints.

Coat and fry

  1. Dip each joint in beaten egg, then coat with bread crumbs, seasoning with salt and pepper.

  2. Fry the joints in a mixture of butter and lard over medium heat until browned on both sides.

Make the sauce and serve

  1. Remove the rabbit and thicken the remaining fat with flour.

  2. Stir in the milk or cream and bring to a boil.

  3. Pour the sauce over the rabbit and serve hot, garnished with sliced lemon.

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. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  4. Bread + milktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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 meat, which cooks through during boiling and frying.
Eggs
Bind the bread crumbs to the rabbit so the coating holds during frying.
Bread crumbs
Form a crisp, browned coating when fried in fat.
Flour
Thickens the fat left from frying into a smooth sauce.
Milk or cream
Adds body and richness to the sauce.

The step that matters

Frying the coated joints over medium heat. Medium heat lets the coating brown evenly while the rabbit cooks through. Too high a heat scorches the crumbs before the meat is done, and too low a heat leaves the coating greasy and pale.

“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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