Skip to main content
Main

Rabbits — Continued

A rabbit joint wrapped in bacon, baked in suet crust with stock, bay leaf, and lemon peel, then steamed.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Rabbits — Continued

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the rabbit

  1. Clean and cut the rabbits into joints.

  2. Wrap each joint in bacon slices.

Assemble in the basin

  1. Grease a basin and line it with suet crust.

  2. Place a bay leaf and lemon peel in the center of the rabbit pieces.

  3. Season to taste and pour in enough stock to cover.

  4. Cover with more suet crust and steam for 2 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.

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

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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 during long gentle steaming.
Bacon
Adds fat and savory flavor that bastes the lean rabbit as it cooks.
Suet crust
Forms a moist, enclosing pastry that shields the filling from drying during steaming.
Rich stock
Provides liquid for moisture and savory depth as the filling cooks.

The step that matters

Covering the basin with suet crust. The crust must seal the basin well so steam cannot escape and the filling stays moist. A loose seal lets the liquid evaporate, leaving the rabbit dry over the two-hour steam.

“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.

You might also like

Lemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesRabbit PattiesRabbit Patties6 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipes