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Fried Rabbit

A rabbit cooked in a pan with rendered pork fat, butter, salt, pepper, optional egg and crumbs, served with lemon and cress.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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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

  1. Soak the rabbit in salt water, then rinse and dry it.

  2. Fry the slices of fat salt pork in a pan to render some fat, then remove the pork.

  3. Add butter to the pan and heat until melted.

Fry and serve

  1. If desired, dip the rabbit pieces in beaten egg, then coat with cracker dust or bread crumbs before frying.

  2. Place the rabbit pieces in the pan, season with salt and pepper, and cook until well done and golden brown.

  3. Serve hot, garnished with lemon slices and cress.

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. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  3. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  4. Pork + breadtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,371 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (popcorn, roasted).

  5. Pork + buttertop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,933 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).

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

What each ingredient does

Rabbit
Provides the meat that is cooked through and browned in the pan.
Fat salt pork
Renders fat into the pan, giving the rabbit a rich, savoury cooking medium.
Butter
Adds fat and flavour to the pan and helps the rabbit brown.
Egg
Binds the crumb coating so it adheres to the rabbit during frying.
Cracker dust or bread crumbs
Forms a crisp, golden coating that browns in the hot fat.

The step that matters

Cooking the rabbit until well done and golden brown. Rabbit is lean and can turn dry if overcooked, but it must be cooked through for safety. Cooking over steady heat in fat browns the surface while the interior finishes cooking.

“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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