Skip to main content
Main

Hare or Rabbits

Roasted rabbit or hare prepared with butter, salt, flour, and optional currant jelly gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Hare or Rabbits

Ingredients

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 rabbit

  1. Skin the rabbit by cutting off the feet and tail.

  2. Cut the skin down the belly and around the neck, then draw the skin off the rabbit whole.

  3. Open the rabbit and remove the entrails, cleaning them thoroughly.

  4. Soak the entrails in cold water until the blood is washed out.

  5. Prepare a dressing as you would for chicken and fill the rabbit with it.

  6. Sew the rabbit shut.

Roast and make gravy

  1. Roast or bake the rabbit at 400°F (200°C), basting often with butter for about an hour.

  2. Make gravy from the drippings by adding a little butter, salt, flour, and currant jelly if desired.

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

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

  5. Flour + curranttop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,077 recipes

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 lean meat that is the main body of the dish.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, and helps the surface brown while basting.
Flour
Thickens the pan drippings into a smooth gravy.
Currant jelly
Adds sweetness and tartness to balance the rich drippings in the gravy.

The step that matters

Basting the rabbit during roasting. Lean rabbit meat dries out easily in the oven. Regular basting with butter adds fat to the surface, which helps keep the meat moist and encourages even browning.

Swap the currant

The recipe marks currant as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (rabbit, butter, flour):

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Coconutfits better
  3. Lemonfits better
  4. Currantthe 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.

More roasted rabbit recipes

with Bacon 3 See all 59 →

You might also like

Rabbit PattiesRabbit Patties6 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipes