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Preserve

Chicken or Rabbit Pudding

A savory pudding made from chicken or rabbit, cooked with spices and gravy, then set in pudding paste.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and mace are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 16% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 12,257 recipes. Both carry myristicin, which smells spice, warm. The science ↓

Chicken or Rabbit Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the meat and gravy

  1. Place the rabbit or chicken pieces in a stewpan with salt, pepper, and mace.

  2. Cover the stewpan with water and stew gently for 30 minutes.

  3. Remove the meat from the stewpan.

  4. Let the meat cool.

  5. Add the head, liver, and bones to the stewpan.

  6. Cook the stewpan for another hour.

  7. Strain the gravy from the stewpan.

  8. Let the gravy cool.

Assemble and boil

  1. Line a pudding basin with pudding paste.

  2. Add the cooled meat to the lined basin.

  3. Pour the cooled gravy over the meat in the basin.

  4. Cover the basin with pudding paste.

  5. Boil the pudding for 1 hour.

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. Pepper + macetop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,257 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

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

    Shared aroma: 2-pentylpyridine (fat).

  3. Rabbit + macetop 28% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together364 recipes

Pepper and mace 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 or chicken
Provides the meat that becomes tender during slow stewing and forms the body of the pudding.
Pudding paste
Forms the enclosing crust that holds the meat and gravy during boiling.
Salt
Seasons the meat and gravy throughout the stewing.

Swap the mace

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against rabbit, 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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