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Sauce

Rabbit-Liver-and-Lemon Sauce

A sauce made from rabbit liver and lemon, boiled, chopped, and strained.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Rabbit and lemon work together. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 626 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Rabbit-Liver-and-Lemon Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the liver

  1. Wash the rabbit liver thoroughly.

  2. Boil the liver in water for about 5 minutes.

  3. Chop the liver finely or pound it with some of the boiling liquid, then strain it through a sieve.

Prepare the lemon and finish

  1. Peel the lemon, removing the yellow rind and white pith, then slice it into squares, discarding the seeds.

  2. Chop a small amount of the yellow peel finely and mix it with the liver.

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 + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together626 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  2. Rabbit + livertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together233 recipes

    Shared aroma: geraniol (rose, geranium).

  3. Liver + lemontop 27% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together768 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Rabbit liver
Forms the main body of the sauce, and its texture depends on being finely chopped or pounded and strained.
Lemon
Adds sharp acidity and fragrance, with the yellow peel carrying most of the aroma.

The step that matters

Boiling the liver. Liver turns grainy, dry and tough when overcooked, because its proteins tighten with prolonged heat. Keeping the boil to about 5 minutes helps the liver stay tender enough to pound and strain smooth.

“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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