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Potted Rabbit

A dish of rabbit pieces seasoned with mace, pepper, salt, cayenne, pimentos, and butter, baked and left to sit.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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 ↓

Potted Rabbit

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash the rabbits and cut them up.

  2. Season with mace, pepper, coarse sea salt, Cayenne, and pimentos.

  3. Pack the rabbit pieces tightly in a small pan, smoothing the surface.

  4. Remove the carcasses and cover the meat with a generous amount of butter.

Bake and rest

  1. Bake gently until cooked through.

  2. Let the dish sit for a day or two before serving.

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. Mace + peppertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,257 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

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

    Shared aroma: 2-pentylpyridine (fat).

  4. Pepper + buttertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

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

  5. Mace + buttertop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together11,405 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

Mace and pepper barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 12,257 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 meat that is cooked, packed and preserved in the dish.
Butter
Covers the meat to add richness and seal it from air as it rests.

The step that matters

Bake gently until cooked through. Low, gentle heat cooks the rabbit evenly and keeps the meat tender and moist, while high heat would toughen and dry the lean meat.

Swap the mace

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

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Thymefits better
  3. Sagefits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against rabbit, pepper, 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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