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Stewed Rabbit

A rabbit stew cooked with onions, carrots, turnip, celery, peppercorns, and stock, thickened with flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and celery match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,173 recipes. Both carry myristicin, which smells spice, warm. The science ↓

Stewed Rabbit

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare and brown

  1. Wipe the rabbit joints and coat them in flour.

  2. Fry the joints in clarified dripping until browned.

  3. Place the rabbit in a cooking pot with stock, onion, carrots, turnip, celery, peppercorns, and salt.

Stew and thicken

  1. Stew for 1½ hours.

  2. Remove the rabbit and vegetables.

  3. Thicken the liquid with flour, stir, and boil.

  4. Slice the vegetables.

  5. Return the sliced vegetables and rabbit to the gravy.

Serve

  1. Serve with boiled pickled pork.

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. Carrot + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  2. Carrot + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Turnip + celerytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,418 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Onion + turniptop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Rabbit
Becomes tender during long, slow stewing, giving the dish its main meat.
Flour
Coats the joints for browning and later thickens the cooking liquid into gravy.
Stock
Cooks the rabbit slowly and forms the liquid that becomes the gravy.
Onion
Softens during stewing and adds sweetness and savoury depth to the gravy.
Carrots
Soften during stewing and add natural sweetness to the gravy.

The step that matters

Thicken the liquid with flour, then boil. Flour must be stirred in smoothly and brought to a full boil so its starch swells and thickens the gravy, and so the raw flour taste cooks off.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (rabbit, flour, carrot, turnip, celery):

  1. Parsnipfits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Arrowrootfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against rabbit, flour, carrot, turnip, celery. 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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