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Creme De Lapin a LA Reine

A creamy rabbit dish made with veal stock, rabbit meat, bread crumbs, almonds, egg yolks, and a roux.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and butter match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and 27,145 recipes mention both. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

The recipe

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the stock

  1. Prepare veal stock a day before the party using veal stock meat, veal bones, and fowl giblets.

  2. Add vegetables as for pot-au-feu.

  3. Simmer the bones and trimmings in the veal stock for 2-3 hours, adding stock to replace any loss from evaporation.

  4. Strain the stock from the bones.

  5. Let the strained stock cool, removing any fat that rises to the surface.

Prepare the rabbit paste

  1. Remove the meat from the rabbit, excluding skin and browned parts.

  2. Mix the rabbit meat with soaked bread crumbs, ground almonds, and hard-boiled yolks in a mortar.

  3. Pass the rabbit mixture through a sieve, moistening with a spoonful of stock if needed.

Make the soup and serve

  1. Melt butter in a saucepan.

  2. Stir in flour.

  3. Gradually add stock while stirring to make a roux.

  4. Add the rabbit paste to the roux and bring to a boil.

  5. Remove from heat and pour into a tureen.

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 aroma chemistry they share, and how many recipes mention both.

  1. Bread + buttertop 3% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together27,145 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Milk + buttertop 3% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together81,222 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  3. Bread + milktop 4% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together11,363 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  4. Meat + rabbittop 4% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together314 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  5. Almond + buttertop 5% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together9,198 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-pentanedione (butter, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Rabbit meat
Forms the main body and flavour of the purée, giving the soup its substance.
Hard-boiled egg yolks
Add richness and a smooth, thickening body to the rabbit paste.
Bread crumbs
Soaked in milk, they add moisture and help bind the rabbit paste smooth.
Ground sweet almonds
Add a delicate nutty flavour and silky texture to the paste.
Flour
Thickens the butter and stock into a roux that gives the soup body.
Butter
Enriches the roux, adding fat and a rounded flavour.

The step that matters

Adding the rabbit paste to the roux. Flour thickens only when the roux is cooked smooth and the stock is added gradually while stirring; lumps form if liquid goes in too fast. Bringing the mixture to a boil then thickens the starch fully, so the soup holds together without clumping.

Flavor stand-ins for the almond

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (veal, meat, rabbit, bread, milk, egg, butter):

  1. Cocoaabout as good a flavor fit
  2. Peasabout as good a flavor fit
  3. Walnutabout as good a flavor fit
  4. Almondthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against veal, meat, rabbit, bread, milk, egg, butter. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes. This compares flavor only: it does not check the job the ingredient does in the dish (bulk, moisture, acidity, structure).

“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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