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Rabbit Pudding

A savory rabbit pudding made with rabbit meat, liver, brains, pickled pork, and spices, baked in pastry.

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

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

Assemble and cook

  1. Lay the seasoned rabbit pieces in a pastry.

  2. Mix the liver and brains into the pastry.

  3. Interlay slices of pickled pork with the mixture.

  4. Boil the assembled pudding for nearly 2 hours.

Make the gravy

  1. Make gravy from the head, lights, bones, and a bit of ham or bacon.

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 filling, providing the body and substance of the pudding.
Rabbit liver
Adds richness and a deeper, mellow flavour to the filling.
Rabbit brains
Contributes a soft, creamy texture that enriches the mixture.
Pickled pork
Adds salty, tangy flavour and fat that moistens the filling as it cooks.

The step that matters

Boiling the assembled pudding. The pudding must cook long enough for the pastry and meat to become fully tender and safely cooked through. Boiling at a steady simmer, rather than a hard rolling boil, helps the pastry hold together and keeps the filling from toughening or breaking apart.

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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