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Rabbit Pudding

A savory dish of rabbit meat, liver, brains, and pickled pork, baked and served with a gravy made from rabbit bones and ham or bacon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and clove match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 17,451 recipes. Both carry ethyl octanoate, which smells fruity, wine. The science ↓

Rabbit Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the rabbit

  1. Clean the rabbit and cut it into pieces, removing the rib bones.

  2. Parboil the rabbit liver and mince it, then mix it with minced rabbit brains.

  3. Season the rabbit pieces with pepper, salt, mushroom powder, and powdered mace.

Assemble and cook

  1. Layer the seasoned rabbit pieces in a baking dish or pie crust.

  2. Mix the liver and brains into the layered rabbit.

  3. Interlay the mixture with slices of pickled pork.

  4. Boil the assembled dish for nearly 2 hours.

Make the gravy

  1. Use the head, lights, and bones of the rabbit to make gravy.

  2. Add a bit of ham or bacon to the gravy.

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 + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  2. Rabbit + porktop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together832 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  3. Clove + macetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,400 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  4. Mushroom + porktop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,875 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methoxy-4-propylphenol (allspice, anise).

  5. Liver + porktop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,606 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-nonanal (fatty, waxy).

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

What each ingredient does

Rabbit
Forms the main meat, giving the pudding its bulk and savory flesh.
Rabbit liver
Adds richness and a deeper, more intense meaty flavor to the filling.
Pickled pork
Adds salty, tangy flavor and fat that seasons the layers as they cook.
Mushroom powder
Contributes concentrated savory, umami flavor to the seasoned meat.

The step that matters

Boil the assembled dish for nearly 2 hours. Long, gentle cooking in liquid breaks down connective tissue and fully cooks the dense layered meat, so the pudding turns tender rather than tough or undercooked in the center.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (rabbit, liver, pepper, mushroom, clove, pork, ham):

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Marjoramfits better
  3. Sagefits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against rabbit, liver, pepper, mushroom, clove, pork, ham. 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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