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Roast Rabbit

A rabbit stuffed with a liver and pork mixture, roasted and basted with butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Thyme and pepper are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,585 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Roast Rabbit

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the stuffing

  1. Parboil the rabbit liver with the slice of fat salt pork.

  2. Chop the liver and pork finely with the bread crumbs, thyme, onion, pepper, and salt.

  3. Fill the body of the rabbit with the mixture and sew it up.

Roast and baste

  1. Rub the outside of the rabbit with sweet oil or butter.

  2. Place butter in the pan with water for basting.

  3. Baste the rabbit frequently while roasting.

  4. Roast for 1.5 hours and serve with mashed potatoes and red currant jelly.

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. Thyme + peppertop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

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

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  3. Thyme + oniontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,171 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

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

  5. Liver + porktop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,606 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-nonanal (fatty, waxy).

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 whole by roasting.
Bread crumbs
Absorb juices in the stuffing, keeping it moist and giving it body.
Butter
Adds fat that promotes browning and a rich flavor on the outside of the rabbit.
Onion
Adds aromatic sweetness and flavor to the stuffing as it cooks.
Fat salt pork
Adds fat to the stuffing, keeping the lean meat moist and flavorful.

The step that matters

Baste the rabbit frequently while roasting. Rabbit is very lean, so it can dry out quickly. Regular basting with melted butter and pan liquid adds moisture to the surface and helps it brown evenly.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (rabbit, liver, pork, bread, thyme, pepper, butter):

  1. Potatofits about as well
  2. Mustardfits about as well
  3. Shallotfits about as well
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against rabbit, liver, pork, bread, thyme, pepper, butter. 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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