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Fried Rabbit

A rabbit fried in butter and lard, served with currant jelly.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Rabbit and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,448 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Fried Rabbit

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Soak the rabbit in salt water for 1.5 hours.

  2. Wipe the rabbit dry and rub the surface with melted butter.

  3. Season with coarse sea salt and black pepper.

Fry and serve

  1. Heat lard and butter in a skillet with the strip of bacon.

  2. Fry the rabbit, turning several times, until well done.

  3. Serve with currant jelly.

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

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  2. Butter + curranttop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,856 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

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

    Shared aroma: 2-pentylpyridine (fat).

  4. Butter + peppertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

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

  5. Pepper + curranttop 28% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,345 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

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

What each ingredient does

Rabbit
Provides the meat that is cooked through and turned to tender, browned pieces in the pan.
Butter
Adds richness and helps the surface brown as it fries.
Lard
Gives a high-heat frying fat that browns the rabbit evenly without burning quickly.
Bacon
Releases smoky fat into the pan, adding savoury flavour to the frying fat.

The step that matters

Fry the rabbit, turning several times, until well done. Rabbit is lean and dries out easily, so frying over steady heat and turning it often browns it evenly and keeps the cooking controlled. Cooking it until well done is the record's stated endpoint, so check that the meat is cooked through rather than relying on colour alone.

Swap the currant

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

  1. Lemonfits better
  2. Mangofits better
  3. Coconutfits better
  4. Currantthe original

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