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
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare the rabbit
Empty, clean, and dry the rabbit.
Line the inside with sausage meat and force meat, then sew it closed.
Skewer the head back between the shoulders and secure the fore joints to the body with a skewer.
Roast
Wrap the rabbit in buttered paper and baste it well.
Remove the paper a few minutes before it's done, flour it, and let it brown.
Cook for about 45 minutes.
Serve
Remove the skewers and serve with brown gravy and red currant jelly.
Garnish with lemon slices.
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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Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together27,232 recipes
Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).
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Rabbit + meattop 12% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked together315 recipes
Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).
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Red currant + lemontop 12% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together309 recipes
Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).
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Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked together124,287 recipes
Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).
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Bread + red curranttop 13% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked 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
- Is the main cooked meat, which the stuffing and roasting method are built around.
- Sausage meat
- Adds richness and fat to the stuffing, keeping the lean meat moist as it cooks.
- Force meat
- Bread-crumb stuffing that fills the cavity and adds body and moisture inside the rabbit.
- Butter
- Fat that carries heat to the paper-wrapped rabbit and helps it stay moist and golden.
- Flour
- Dusted on at the end, it helps the surface brown and form a crisp, golden crust.
The step that matters
Remove the paper before it's done, then flour and brown. Leaving the paper on too long keeps the surface pale and soft. Removing it near the end lets dry heat brown the flour and skin, but timing matters so the meat does not dry out.
Swap the red currant
How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (rabbit, meat, bread, butter, flour, lemon):
- Raisinfits better
- Coconutfits better
- Figfits about as well
- 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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