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Dessert

Brown Fricassee of Rabbit

A rabbit fricassee cooked with pork fat, onions, herbs, butter, peppercorns, and browned flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Rabbit and pork work together. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 832 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Brown Fricassee of Rabbit

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the rabbit

  1. Soak the rabbit pieces in salted cold water for 1 hour.

  2. Rinse in cold water, then place in a saucepan and cover with hot water and a pinch of salt.

  3. Cook until tender, skimming as necessary.

Make the sauce

  1. In another pan, fry the fat pork, onion slices, sweet herbs, butter, and peppercorns until browned.

  2. Add the cooking liquid from the rabbit, bring to a boil, then strain.

  3. Return the strained liquid to the rabbit, thicken with browned flour, and boil again.

Serve

  1. Serve on a hot platter.

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 + porktop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together832 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  2. Pork + oniontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,214 recipes

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

  3. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Pork + buttertop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,933 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Rabbit
Provides the main meat, which becomes tender through slow simmering in water.
Browned flour
Thickens the cooking liquid into a sauce as its starch swells with heat.
Fat pork
Adds fat and savoury flavour to the broth as it browns with the aromatics.
Butter
Adds richness and aroma while the aromatics brown in the pan.

The step that matters

Skimming the rabbit while it cooks. Skimming removes foam and scum that rise during simmering, keeping the cooking liquid clear and preventing a muddy, off-tasting sauce.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (rabbit, pork, butter, flour):

  1. Potatofits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Chivefits about as well
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against rabbit, pork, butter, flour. 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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