Skip to main content
Main

Brown Rabbit Soup

A hearty soup made with rabbit, onions, carrots, parsley, and mushroom ketchup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Parsley and carrot match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,053 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Brown Rabbit Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Flour and lightly fry the rabbit joints.

  2. Fry the onions until they are a clear brown.

Make the soup

  1. Pour the boiling water over the fried onions and rabbit.

  2. Add salt, parsley, carrots, and peppercorns.

  3. Boil gently for 5 to 5.5 hours, skimming off any scum.

  4. Strain the soup and let it cool to skim off the fat.

Finish and serve

  1. Reheat the soup and serve with fried bread snippets.

  2. Thicken with flour browned in the oven and mix in mushroom ketchup.

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. Parsley + carrottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

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

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

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

  3. Onion + parsleytop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25,843 recipes

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

  4. Bread + mushroomtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,536 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  5. Carrot + mushroomtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,796 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Rabbit
Provides the meat and rich flavour that the soup is built around.
Onions
Frying them to a clear brown adds sweetness and deep savoury colour to the broth.
Carrots
Add natural sweetness and body to the soup as it simmers.
Flour
Browned flour thickens the soup and gives it a richer, nuttier colour.
Mushroom ketchup
Adds concentrated savoury, umami depth to the finished soup.

The step that matters

Boil gently for 5 to 5.5 hours, skimming off any scum. A gentle simmer keeps the broth clear and lets the rabbit become tender without breaking apart. Skimming removes foam that would otherwise cloud the soup and taint its flavour.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (rabbit, flour, parsley, carrot, bread, mushroom, ketchup):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against rabbit, flour, parsley, carrot, bread, mushroom, ketchup. 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.

More rabbit soup recipes

Brown 10Curry 4 See all 103 →

You might also like

Brown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesCarrot SoupCarrot Soup134 recipesWhite BreadWhite Bread80 recipesBread OmeletteBread Omelette60 recipes