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Rabbit Pie

A savory pie with rabbit, pork, liver, bacon, herbs, and gravy, baked in a pie crust.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Mace and nutmeg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,557 recipes. Both carry myristicin, which smells spice, warm. The science ↓

Rabbit Pie

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the filling

  1. Preheat the oven to 400°F (200°C).

  2. Season the rabbit and pork pieces with salt and pepper, and place them in a dish.

  3. In a mortar, beat the parboiled livers with the same weight of fat bacon, adding pepper, salt, mace, and chopped herbs.

  4. Form the liver mixture into small balls and distribute them in the dish with the meat.

  5. Grate nutmeg over the mixture and pour in the gravy.

Bake

  1. Cover the dish with a thick pie crust and bake 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. Mace + nutmegtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,557 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

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

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  3. Pepper + nutmegtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  4. Pork + livertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,606 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: geraniol (rose, geranium).

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

What each ingredient does

Rabbit
Forms the main body of the pie, giving it its meaty bulk and chew.
Pickled pork
Adds salty, savoury flavour and fat that enriches the filling as it cooks.
Liver
Beaten into a smooth, rich mixture that gives the filling its dense, savoury character.
Fat bacon
Adds fat that keeps the liver balls moist and rich, and carries flavour.
Gravy
Supplies moisture and body so the filling stays juicy during baking.

The step that matters

Covering the dish with the pie crust. A thick crust must seal the dish well so steam and juices are trapped, keeping the meat moist instead of drying out in the oven.

Swap the mace

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against rabbit, pork, pepper, liver, nutmeg. 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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