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Winter Biles of Fare

A rabbit dish roasted with fat pork, served with a browned flour gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 18 ingredients
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Why it works: Rabbit and pork work together. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 832 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Winter Biles of Fare

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

Roast the rabbits

  1. Sew up the rabbits and cover with thin slices of fat pork, bound with pack thread.

  2. Roast the rabbits longer than fowls of the same weight, about two minutes more per pound.

  3. Baste freely, mixing a little vinegar with the dripping at the end.

Serve

  1. Unbind the strings, remove the crisp pork, and draw out the thread from the rabbits.

  2. Lay the pork around the rabbits in a hot dish.

  3. Thicken the strained gravy with browned flour, boil, and serve in a boat.

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

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  2. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  3. Onion + porktop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,214 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  4. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Pork + milktop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,386 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-heptenal (creamy, biscuit).

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

Rabbits
Provide the lean meat that is roasted and served as the main dish.
Fat pork
Bastes the lean rabbit meat as it cooks, adding moisture and crisp browned flavour to the surface.
Browned flour
Thickens the strained gravy and adds a deeper, toasted colour and flavour.
Vinegar
Adds a sharp acidity to the dripping used for basting, balancing the rich fat.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (rabbit, pork, vinegar, flour, butter, milk, egg):

  1. Potatofits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Asparagusfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against rabbit, pork, vinegar, flour, butter, milk, egg. 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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