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Chicken or Rabbit Pudding

A savory pudding made from rabbit or chicken, stewed and encased in pudding paste.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and mace are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 16% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 12,257 recipes. Both carry myristicin, which smells spice, warm. The science ↓

Chicken or Rabbit Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the gravy

  1. Combine the rabbit or chicken pieces with salt, pepper, mace, and enough water to cover in a stewpan. Stew gently for 30 minutes.

  2. Remove the meat and let it cool.

  3. Add the head, liver, and bones to the stewpan and cook for another hour.

  4. Strain the gravy and let it cool.

Assemble and boil

  1. Line a pudding basin with the paste, add the meat, and pour the cooled gravy over it.

  2. Cover with paste and boil for 1 hour.

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

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

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

    Shared aroma: 2-pentylpyridine (fat).

  3. Rabbit + macetop 28% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together364 recipes

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

Rabbit or chicken
Provides the main meat, which becomes tender through gentle stewing.
Pudding paste
Forms the lining and lid that enclose the meat and gravy while it boils.
Mace
Adds a warm, aromatic spice flavour to the gravy.

The step that matters

Gentle stewing of the meat. Stewing gently rather than boiling hard keeps the meat tender and prevents it from toughening or breaking apart, which gives a clearer, better-textured gravy.

Swap the mace

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against rabbit, pepper. 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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