Name: Rabbit Pie
Ingredients: 2 rabbits; pepper; coarse sea salt; slices of beef-steak, ham, or bacon; water or gravy; flour

Why it works: Rabbit and beef work together. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 252 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Rabbit Pie

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

Skin, clean, and wash the rabbits thoroughly.
Cut the rabbits into pieces and season with pepper and coarse sea salt.

Bake

Place slices of beef-steak, ham, or bacon in the bottom of a baking dish.
Add a little water or gravy and a little flour to thicken.
Cover the dish and bake at 350°F (175°C) for 1.5 hours.

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.

Rabbit + beeftop 10% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together252 recipes

Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).
Pepper + beeftop 10% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together18,971 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).
Rabbit + flourtop 13% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,067 recipes

Shared aroma: acetaldehyde (pungent, ethereal).
Rabbit + peppertop 18% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,334 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-pentylpyridine (fat).
Pepper + flourtop 19% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together50,459 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Rabbits: Provide the main meat, which becomes tender through slow covered baking.
Beef-steak, ham, or bacon: Adds savory, salty flavor and fat that enriches the meat as it bakes.
Flour: Thickens the cooking liquid into a light gravy around the meat.

“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.