Why it works: Flour and butter 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 ↓
Fried Rabbit
Ingredients
Directions
Fry the rabbit
Roll the jointed rabbit in flour.
Heat hot butter in a pan and fry the rabbit until it is a nice brown.
Make the gravy
Dredge a little flour into the pan.
Carefully add a little water to the pan to make gravy.
Serve
Pour the gravy around the fried rabbit pieces on a platter.
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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Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked together124,287 recipes
Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).
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Rabbit + flourtop 13% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together1,067 recipes
Shared aroma: acetaldehyde (pungent, ethereal).
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Rabbit + buttertop 15% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together1,448 recipes
Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).
Flour and butter 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 protein, which cooks through and browns in the hot fat.
- Flour
- Coats the rabbit to help it brown and later thickens the pan liquid into gravy.
- Butter
- Hot fat that conducts heat for frying and browns the coated rabbit surface.
The step that matters
Carefully add a little water to the pan to make gravy.. Water hitting very hot fat spatters and can cool the pan abruptly. Adding it slowly while scraping up the browned flour lets the starch in the flour thicken the liquid smoothly into gravy.
“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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