Skip to main content
Main

Baked Rabbit Pie

A pie filled with stewed rabbit and gravy, topped with a crust.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Butter and flour 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 ↓

Baked Rabbit Pie

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the rabbit

  1. Wash the rabbit pieces.

  2. Season the rabbit pieces with salt and pepper.

  3. Cover the rabbit pieces with cold water.

  4. Stew the rabbit pieces until tender.

  5. Stir in the butter mixed with flour.

Assemble the pie

  1. Make a pie crust.

  2. Butter the pie dish, lining the sides.

  3. Place the rabbit pieces in the dish.

  4. Add enough gravy to prevent burning.

  5. Cover the pie with a pie crust lid.

  6. Leave an opening on top.

  7. Decorate the opening with strips of crust.

Bake and serve

  1. Bake at 400°F (200°C) until golden.

  2. Serve in the baking dish with the remaining gravy kept hot.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Rabbit + flourtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,067 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetaldehyde (pungent, ethereal).

  3. Rabbit + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,448 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  4. Rabbit + peppertop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,334 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-pentylpyridine (fat).

  5. Pepper + flourtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together50,459 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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
Provides the main meat, which becomes tender through slow stewing in liquid.
Butter mixed with flour
Thickens the cooking liquid into a gravy and adds richness.
Pie crust
Encloses the filling and browns in the oven to form a golden crust.

The step that matters

Stew the rabbit pieces until tender. Rabbit is lean and can turn dry or tough if not cooked slowly in enough liquid. Stewing breaks down connective tissue, so the meat becomes tender before it bakes in the pie.

“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.

You might also like

Rabbit PattiesRabbit Patties6 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipes