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Puree of Rabbit

A smooth rabbit puree made with veal stock, bread crumbs, almonds, egg yolks, and a roux.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Puree of Rabbit

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the stock

  1. Prepare veal stock a day before the party using veal meat, bones, and fowl giblets.

  2. Add vegetables as for pot-au-feu.

  3. Simmer the bones and trimmings in the veal stock for 2–3 hours, adding stock to replace any loss from evaporation.

  4. Strain the stock from the bones and let it cool, removing any fat that rises to the surface.

Make the rabbit paste

  1. Remove skin and browned parts from the rabbit.

  2. Mix the meat with soaked bread crumbs, ground almonds, and hard‑boiled egg yolks in a mortar.

  3. Pass the rabbit mixture through a sieve, moistening with a spoonful of stock if needed.

Make the sauce

  1. Melt butter in a saucepan.

  2. Stir in flour.

  3. Gradually add stock while stirring to make a roux.

  4. Add the rabbit paste to the roux and bring to a boil.

  5. Remove from heat.

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

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

  2. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  4. Almond + buttertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,245 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-pentanedione (butter, sweet).

  5. Meat + rabbittop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together315 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

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

What each ingredient does

Rabbit meat
Provides the main flavour and the body of the puree.
Bread crumbs soaked in milk
Adds moisture and softness, helping the paste stay smooth and light.
Hard-boiled egg yolks
Add richness and fat, giving the puree a smooth, creamy texture.
Ground sweet almonds
Add body and a nutty aroma that thickens the paste.
Butter
Provides fat for the roux, carrying flavour and giving a smooth base.
Flour
Thickens the stock with butter to form the roux that gives the sauce body.

The step that matters

Adding stock to the roux. Adding liquid gradually while stirring keeps the flour smooth and evenly thickened. Adding it all at once can leave lumps that are hard to remove.

Swap the almond

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (veal, meat, rabbit, bread, milk, egg, butter):

  1. Walnutfits about as well
  2. Almondthe original
  3. Peasfits about as well
  4. Cocoafits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against veal, meat, rabbit, bread, milk, egg, butter. 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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