Name: Rabbit
Ingredients: rabbit; rabbit gravy; croutons; cooked vegetables; jelly; fried force-meat balls (optional); bones for gravy

Why it works: Rabbit and meat work together. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 315 recipes. Both carry 1-octen-3-ol, which smells mushroom, earthy. The science ↓

Rabbit

Ingredients

Directions

Warm and arrange

Warm the rabbit between two plates.
Arrange it in little piles around the rabbit, omitting the sausages.

Hash, gravy and garnish

For a brown hash, use rabbit gravy or make a piquant sauce.
Reheat the meat and garnish the dish with croutons or a border of cooked vegetables.
Add a bit of jelly to improve the gravy, using 1 pint for ½ to ¾ pound of rabbit.
Stew down the bones to make 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.

Rabbit + meattop 12% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together315 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Rabbit: The main meat, providing the body and flavour of the stew.
Rabbit gravy: Supplies the sauce and moisture that coat the meat.
Jelly: Adds body and gloss to the gravy, as its gelatin sets and thickens it.
Bones: Stewed down to release gelatin and rich flavour into the gravy.