Name: Rabbit Hash
Ingredients: 2 rabbits; ½ pound pork; 2 eggs; ¼ teaspoon salt; 3 pounds lard; ¼ teaspoon pepper

Why it works: Rabbit and pork work together. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 832 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Rabbit Hash

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 300°F (150°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the meat

Remove meat from the bones of the rabbits and grind it with the pork.
In a deep bowl, mix the ground meat with eggs, salt, and pepper.

Shape and bake

Form the mixture into a long shape and place it in a baking dish.
Cover the shape with lard and bake slowly at 300°F (150°C).

Serve

Serve with tomato sauce.

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 + porktop 6% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together832 recipes

Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).
Pork + peppertop 16% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together22,121 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).
Rabbit + peppertop 18% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,334 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-pentylpyridine (fat).
Rabbit + eggtop 27% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together558 recipes

Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).
Pork + eggtop 30% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together10,387 recipes

Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs: Bind the ground meat so it holds together when shaped and baked.
Lard: Covers the shape during slow baking, adding fat and moisture to the surface.
Pork: Adds fat to the ground rabbit, keeping the mixture moist and tender.

“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.