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To Boil Rabbits

A dish of boiled rabbits served with onion sauce and garnished with myrtle or barberries.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Rabbit and onion are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,292 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

To Boil Rabbits

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Skewer the rabbits with their heads straight up, forelegs down, and hind legs straight.

  2. Remove the jawbones and insert the jawbones into the eyes.

Cook and serve

  1. Boil the rabbits for at least 45 minutes.

  2. Garnish with a sprig of myrtle or barberries in their mouths.

  3. Serve.

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 + oniontop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,292 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  2. Rabbit + saucetop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together330 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  3. Onion + saucetop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together10,474 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  4. Rabbit + myrtletop 47% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4 recipes
  5. Onion + myrtletop 48% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4 recipes

    Shared aroma: eugenol (clove, spicy).

Onion and sauce barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 10,474 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

Rabbits
Form the main protein of the dish, cooked through by boiling.
Onion sauce
Served alongside to add moisture and a savoury, sweet onion flavour.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (rabbit, sauce, myrtle):

  1. Mustardfits better
  2. Turnipfits about as well
  3. Carrotfits about as well
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against rabbit, sauce, myrtle. 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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