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Roast Rabbit

Roast rabbit stuffed with sausage meat and bread crumbs, baked in buttered paper, served with brown gravy and red currant jelly.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Roast Rabbit

Oven, in the book's wordsA good oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the rabbit

  1. Empty, skin, wash the rabbit thoroughly; wipe it dry.

  2. Line the inside with sausage meat and seasoned bread crumbs.

  3. Sew the stuffing inside and skewer the head back between the shoulders.

  4. Cut off the fore joints of the shoulders and legs, bring them close to the body, and secure with a skewer.

Roast and serve

  1. Wrap the rabbit in buttered paper and baste it well.

  2. A few minutes before it's done, remove the paper, flour it, and let it brown.

  3. Roast for about 45 minutes.

  4. Remove the skewers and serve with brown gravy and red currant jelly.

  5. Garnish with lemon slices.

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. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

  2. Rabbit + meattop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together315 recipes

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

  3. Red currant + lemontop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together309 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Bread + red curranttop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together84 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

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 and provides the meat that is roasted.
Sausage meat
Stuffs the cavity, adding fat and richness that keeps the inside moist as it cooks.
Bread crumbs
Bind the stuffing and soak up fat and juices, giving it a softer texture.
Butter
Enriches the wrapping paper so the rabbit is basted and stays moist as it roasts.
Flour
Dusted on at the end so the exposed surface browns and forms a crisp, golden coat.

The step that matters

Removing the paper and flouring the rabbit. Timing this near the end lets the surface brown and crisp. Doing it too early keeps the rabbit pale and soft, and leaving the paper on too long stops browning.

Swap the red currant

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (rabbit, meat, bread, butter, flour, lemon):

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Coconutfits better
  3. Figfits about as well
  4. Red currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against rabbit, meat, bread, butter, flour, lemon. 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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