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Curried Rabbit

A stew of rabbit pieces cooked in butter, onions, curry powder, flour, mushroom powder, and stock, served with boiled rice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and mushroom are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 12,525 recipes. Both carry trans-2-decenal, which smells waxy, orange. The science ↓

Curried Rabbit

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Clean, skin, and wash the rabbit thoroughly, then cut it into joints.

Make the curry sauce

  1. In a stewpan, melt the butter and sauté the onions until browned, being careful not to burn them.

  2. Pour in the boiling stock.

  3. Mix the curry powder and flour smoothly with a little water, then add to the saucepan along with the mushroom powder.

  4. Let the mixture simmer for about 30 minutes.

Serve

  1. Squeeze in the lemon juice before serving.

  2. Serve the rabbit in the center of a platter with the rice, boiled dry, piled around it.

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 + mushroomtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,525 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

  2. Rice + mushroomtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,515 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-nonadienal (fatty, green).

  3. Rice + oniontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,433 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  4. Onion + mushroomtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,626 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  5. Rice + lemontop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,366 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Butter
Adds fat for sautéing the onions and helps them brown richly.
Onions
Sweeten and deepen the sauce's flavor as they brown.
Stock
Provides the liquid that forms the body of the curry sauce.
Flour
Thickens the sauce as it simmers.
Curry powder
Supplies the main spiced aroma and flavor of the dish.

The step that matters

Browning the onions. Onions should turn golden brown, not black. Gentle browning develops sweet, savory flavors through Maillard reactions, while burnt onions taste bitter and can spoil the whole sauce.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (rice, butter, onion, flour, mushroom):

  1. Avocadofits better
  2. Coconutfits better
  3. Cherryfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against rice, butter, onion, flour, mushroom. 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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