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Roast Rabbit

A rabbit stuffed with heart, liver, pork fat, and bread crumbs, roasted with butter and water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 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 ↓

Roast Rabbit

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the rabbit

  1. Clean and wash the rabbit.

  2. Soak the rabbit in salted water for 1.5 hours, changing the water once.

  3. Have the butcher skin the rabbit.

Make the stuffing

  1. Parboil the heart and liver, then chop them finely.

  2. Mix the chopped heart and liver with minced fat pork.

  3. Make a moist stuffing with bread crumbs, using the giblet boiling water.

  4. Stuff the rabbit with the mixture and sew it up.

Roast

  1. Rub the rabbit with butter.

  2. Roast the rabbit, basting with butter and water until the gravy flows freely.

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

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

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

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

  4. Pork + breadtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,371 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (popcorn, roasted).

  5. Pork + buttertop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,933 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).

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, cooking into tender meat as it roasts.
Bread crumbs
Absorb the giblet water and fat, keeping the stuffing moist rather than dry.
Butter
Adds fat that promotes browning and richness on the roasting rabbit's surface.
Fat pork
Adds fat to the stuffing, keeping the mixture moist and flavorful during roasting.
Heart and liver
Contribute rich, savory flavor and body to the stuffing.

The step that matters

Roast the rabbit, basting with butter and water until the gravy flows freely.. Rabbit is very lean, so it dries out easily. Regular basting adds moisture and fat to the surface, helping the meat stay juicy and the pan juices form a gravy.

“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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