Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓
Fried Rabbit
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare
Boil the cleaned rabbit in water for 10 minutes.
Drain and let it cool, then cut into joints.
Coat and fry
Dip each joint in beaten egg, then coat with bread crumbs, seasoning with salt and pepper.
Fry the joints in a mixture of butter and lard over medium heat until browned on both sides.
Remove the rabbit and thicken the remaining fat with flour.
Make the sauce and serve
Stir in the milk or cream and bring to a boil.
Pour the sauce over the rabbit and serve hot with onion sauce.
Garnish with sliced lemon.
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.
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Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairsSmell alikestrongCooked together27,047 recipes
Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).
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Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together27,232 recipes
Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).
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Butter + milktop 7% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together81,283 recipes
Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).
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Bread + milktop 11% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together11,466 recipes
Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).
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Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked together124,287 recipes
Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).
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
- The main meat; boiling it first cooks it through before the joints are fried and browned.
- Eggs
- Bind the bread crumbs to the surface of each joint.
- Bread crumbs
- Form a crisp, browned coating when fried in fat.
- Flour
- Thickens the frying fat into the base of the sauce.
- Milk or cream
- Adds body and richness to the sauce.
The step that matters
Thicken the fat with flour. Cooking the flour briefly in the hot fat before adding liquid helps prevent lumps and a raw floury taste. Adding the milk or cream and bringing it to a boil lets the starch swell and thicken the sauce.
“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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