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Roast Rabbit with Brown Gravy

Roast rabbit served with a brown gravy made from stock or beef bones and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Rabbit and beef work together. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 252 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Roast Rabbit with Brown Gravy

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare and roast

  1. Preheat the oven to 400°F (200°C).

  2. Place the rabbit in a hot dripping tin with melted dripping and bacon slices on top.

  3. Roast slowly for 1.5 hours, basting continuously.

Make the gravy and serve

  1. For the gravy, use stock or beef bones, thicken with flour, and serve hot with the rabbit.

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. Rabbit + beeftop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together252 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  2. Rabbit + flourtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,067 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetaldehyde (pungent, ethereal).

  3. Flour + beeftop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together10,677 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and beef barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 10,677 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
The main meat, which becomes tender and juicy with slow roasting.
Melted dripping
Fat that conducts heat evenly and helps the meat brown and develop flavour.
Bacon
Renders fat over the rabbit, adding savoury flavour and moisture as it cooks.
Flour
Thickens the pan juices into a smooth gravy.
Stock or beef bones
Provides the savoury liquid base for the gravy.

The step that matters

Basting continuously during the roast. Spooning the hot fat over the rabbit keeps the surface moist and encourages even browning. Without it, the lean meat can dry out over the long roast.

“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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