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Stewed Rabbit

A rabbit stew with vegetables, seasoned with peppercorns and salt, thickened with flour and served with boiled pickled pork.

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. Transfer the rabbit to a cooking pot or stew-pan.

Stew

  1. Add stock, onion, carrots, turnip, celery, peppercorns, and salt.

  2. Stew for 1½ hours.

  3. Remove the rabbit and vegetables from the pot.

Thicken and serve

  1. Thicken the remaining liquid with flour, stir, and boil.

  2. Slice the vegetables and return them along with the rabbit to the gravy.

  3. 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
Provides the main meat, which becomes tender through long, slow stewing.
Flour
Coats the joints for browning and later thickens the cooking liquid into gravy.
Stock
Forms the cooking liquid that carries flavour and keeps the meat moist.
Onion
Adds savoury sweetness and aroma to the gravy as it softens during stewing.
Carrots
Contribute natural sweetness and body to the stewed gravy.

The step that matters

Thicken the remaining liquid with flour, stir, and boil. Flour added to hot liquid clumps unless it is stirred in smoothly, and it must boil to cook out its raw starch taste and to thicken fully.

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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