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To Roast a Rabbit

A rabbit roasted with bacon, foremeat stuffing, and butter, served with brown gravy and optional currant jelly.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

To Roast a Rabbit

Ingredients

Directions

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

Prepare

  1. Remove the backbone from the rabbit carefully.

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

  3. Fill the rabbit with foremeat and sew it up.

  4. Truss the rabbit and place it in a roasting pan.

Roast and serve

  1. Roast at a clear, brisk fire (400 °F / 200 °C), basting constantly with butter.

  2. Dust the rabbit with flour soon after it is laid down.

  3. 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. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: acetaldehyde (pungent, ethereal).

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

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

  5. Flour + curranttop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,077 recipes

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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
Forms the main body of the dish, cooked through by dry roasting heat.
Bacon
Lines the cavity, adding fat that bastes the meat from inside and adds savory flavor.
Butter
Basted over the surface, adding fat that promotes browning and a rich, tender crust.
Flour
Dusted on the surface, helping form a crisp, browned coating as it cooks.

The step that matters

Basting constantly with butter. Lean rabbit meat dries out quickly over high heat. Regular basting keeps the surface moist and encourages even golden browning, so the outside does not scorch before the inside is cooked.

Swap the currant

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against rabbit, butter, 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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