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To Pot Rabbits

A preserved rabbit dish cooked with butter and spices, left to sit for two days before serving.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and allspice match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,395 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

To Pot Rabbits

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the rabbit

  1. Cut up the rabbits and remove the leg bones at the thigh.

  2. Keep the heads and carcasses, but remove meat from the neck.

Season and pack

  1. Season the meat with black pepper, mace, Cayenne, salt, and allspice, all in very fine powder.

  2. Pack the meat closely in a small pan and smooth the top.

Bake and preserve

  1. Add a good amount of butter and bake gently.

  2. Let it sit in the pan for two days, then transfer to small pots, adding more butter.

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 + allspicetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,395 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Mace + allspicetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  3. Rabbit + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,448 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

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

    Shared aroma: 2-pentylpyridine (fat).

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
Provides the meat that becomes tender and rich during slow baking and resting.
Butter
Adds fat and moisture, enriching the meat and helping it keep as it is covered in fat.
Mace
Contributes warm, aromatic flavour to the seasoned meat.
Allspice
Adds warm, aromatic flavour to the seasoning.

The step that matters

Bake gently. Low, gentle heat lets the tough connective tissue in the rabbit break down slowly, so the meat turns tender and moist rather than dry or stringy. Too much heat toughens the proteins and drives out moisture.

Swap the mace

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against rabbit, pepper, allspice, 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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