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To Pot Rabbits

A dish of rabbit meat seasoned with pepper, mace, cayenne, salt, allspice, baked with butter and served with livers.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and allspice match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,395 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

To Pot Rabbits

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the meat

  1. Cut up the rabbits.

  2. Remove the leg bones at the thigh.

  3. Pack the meat tightly in a small pan.

  4. Season the packed meat with pepper, mace, cayenne, salt, and allspice, all finely powdered.

  5. Smooth the top of the meat mixture.

  6. Keep the heads and carcasses aside.

  7. Remove the meat from the neck.

Bake

  1. Add a generous amount of butter on top.

  2. Bake gently.

Rest and serve

  1. Let it sit in the pan for two days.

  2. Transfer to small pots, adding more butter.

  3. Include the livers in the pots as they are tasty.

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 + allspicetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,395 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Mace + allspicetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  3. Rabbit + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,448 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  4. Pepper + macetop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,257 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  5. Rabbit + peppertop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,334 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-pentylpyridine (fat).

Pepper and mace barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 12,257 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Rabbits
Provide the main meat, whose tender texture is set by gentle, slow cooking.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, keeping the packed meat moist during baking and resting.

The step that matters

Bake gently. Low, gentle heat cooks the lean rabbit meat slowly, so its connective tissue softens without the meat drying out or toughening.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (rabbit, pepper, allspice, butter):

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Nutmegfits better
  3. Parsleyfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against rabbit, pepper, allspice, butter. 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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