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To Eoast a Rabbit

A rabbit stuffed with forcemeat, lined with bacon, roasted, basted with butter, served with brown gravy and optional currant jelly.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Rabbit and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,448 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

To Eoast a Rabbit

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Line the inside of the rabbit with thin slices of bacon.

  2. Fill the rabbit with forcemeat and sew it up.

  3. Truss the rabbit and roast it over a clear, brisk fire.

Roast and serve

  1. Baste constantly with butter.

  2. Serve with good brown gravy and currant jelly if desired.

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 + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,448 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  2. Butter + curranttop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,856 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

  3. Rabbit + curranttop 29% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together105 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

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

What each ingredient does

Rabbit
Forms the main body of the dish, cooking through as the meat becomes tender over heat.
Thin slices of bacon
Lines the cavity, adding fat that bastes the lean rabbit meat as it roasts.
Forcemeat
Fills the cavity, adding moisture and flavour to the rabbit as it cooks.
Butter
Basting fat that promotes gentle browning and a rich, glossy surface.

The step that matters

Baste constantly with butter. The rabbit is lean and dries out easily over a hot fire. Frequent basting with melted fat keeps the surface moist and helps it brown evenly.

Swap the currant

The recipe marks currant as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (rabbit, butter):

  1. Coconutfits better
  2. Lemonfits better
  3. Mangofits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against rabbit, butter. 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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