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Rabbit Pie

A savory pie with rabbit, salt pork or ham, hard boiled eggs, stock, and pastry.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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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 Pie

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut the rabbit into small joints.

  2. Mix the flour, salt, and pepper on a plate, then dip the rabbit joints into this seasoning.

Assemble and bake

  1. Place the seasoned rabbit, salt pork or ham, and quartered hard boiled eggs alternately in a pie dish.

  2. Pour in the stock or water, cover with pastry, and finish as you would for a beef steak pie.

  3. Bake for about 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. Rabbit + porktop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together832 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. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Pork + peppertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,121 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: 2-pentylpyridine (fat).

Egg and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 106,462 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
Provides the main meat, which becomes tender during the long baking.
Pastry
Forms a crisp, golden crust that encloses the filling.
Salt pork or ham
Adds savoury fat and salty flavour that seasons the meat and stock.
Hard boiled eggs
Add firm texture and richness to the filling.
Flour
Coats the rabbit and helps thicken the juices into a light gravy.

The step that matters

Dipping the rabbit in seasoned flour. Coating the joints in flour helps the surface brown and gives the juices body, so the filling is not thin or watery.

“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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