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Rabbit Pie

A savory pie filled with rabbit, bacon, beef, parsley, salt, pepper, and water or stock, topped with a crust.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Pork and beef match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,690 recipes. Both carry 12-methyltridecanal, which smells tallowy, beefy. The science ↓

Rabbit Pie

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Make the pie crust using flour and clarified dripping as you would for veal and ham pie.

  2. Wash the rabbit in cold water, dry it, and cut it into neat pieces.

  3. Slice the bacon or salt pork and cut the beef steak into small pieces.

Assemble and bake

  1. Arrange the rabbit, bacon, and beef in a pie dish. Sprinkle with parsley, salt, and pepper, then add cold water or stock.

  2. Cover the pie with the crust and seal it.

  3. Bake in a 400°F (200°C) oven for 1.5 to 2 hours, depending on the age of the rabbit, until it is pale brown.

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. Pork + beeftop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,690 recipes

    Shared aroma: 12-methyltridecanal (tallowy, beefy).

  2. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  3. Rabbit + porktop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together832 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Beef + peppertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,971 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

What each ingredient does

Rabbit
Forms the main lean meat, which becomes tender during slow baking.
Bacon or salt pork
Adds fat and savory flavor that seasons and moistens the meat as it cooks.
Beef steak
Adds meaty flavor and richness to the filling.
Flour
Provides the structure of the pie crust once mixed and baked.
Clarified dripping
Adds fat that makes the crust tender and short rather than tough.

The step that matters

Seal the crust fully before baking. A tight seal traps steam and meat juices inside the pie, so the filling cooks in its own liquid. Gaps let liquid escape, leaving the meat drier and the crust less evenly cooked.

Swap the parsley

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

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Marjoramfits about as well
  3. Turmericfits about as well
  4. Parsleythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against rabbit, pork, beef, pepper, flour. 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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