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Rabbit with Spinach

A rabbit dish cooked with bacon, onions, carrots, thyme, parsley, bay leaf, stock, and served over spinach, finished with lemon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Thyme and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,057 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Rabbit with Spinach

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the rabbit

  1. Bone the thighs and legs of the rabbit and replace the bones with pieces of bacon.

  2. Sew up the openings to shape the limbs properly.

Cook

  1. Place the rabbit in a saucepan with bacon, onions, carrots, thyme, parsley, bay leaf, and stock.

  2. Cook for 2 hours on low heat.

Serve

  1. Strain the stock and serve the rabbit cut up on a bed of spinach.

  2. Just before serving, squeeze the juice of 1 lemon over the dish.

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. Thyme + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Carrot + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

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

  3. Carrot + thymetop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4,563 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  4. Onion + carrottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together21,601 recipes

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

  5. Onion + thymetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,171 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Rabbit thighs
Provide the main meat, which becomes tender during the long, gentle simmer.
Rabbit legs
Provide the main meat, which becomes tender during the long, gentle simmer.
Bacon
Adds fat and savoury flavour that moistens the lean rabbit meat as it cooks.
Lemon juice (in the method)
Adds acidity that brightens the rich, savoury flavour just before serving.

The step that matters

Cook for 2 hours on low heat. Low, slow heat lets the connective tissue in the rabbit break down gradually, so the meat becomes tender without drying out. Higher heat tends to toughen lean rabbit meat.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (rabbit, carrot, thyme, parsley):

  1. Parsnipfits better
  2. Turnipfits better
  3. Shallotfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against rabbit, carrot, thyme, parsley. 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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