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Ragout of Rabbits

A stew of rabbit with onion, bacon, lemon, and gravy, thickened with flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Ragout of Rabbits

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the base

  1. Slice the onion and dredge it with flour.

  2. Fry the onion in butter until brown.

  3. Add gravy and mix well.

  4. Transfer to a saucepan.

Stew

  1. Add the jointed rabbit, sliced bacon, and lemon.

  2. Season with salt and pepper.

  3. Cover the saucepan.

  4. Stew for one hour or until the meat is tender.

  5. Thicken with browned flour.

  6. Boil once.

  7. 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. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

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

  3. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Onion + rabbittop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,292 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Flour + rabbittop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,067 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetaldehyde (pungent, ethereal).

Flour and butter 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 long, covered stewing.
Flour
Coats the onion and, when browned, thickens the sauce.
Butter
Fat that fries the onion and adds richness and browning.
Bacon
Adds smoky, salty fat that flavours the stewing liquid.
Gravy
Forms the liquid base of the ragout, adding savoury flavour and moisture.

The step that matters

Stew until the meat is tender. Rabbit is lean and its connective tissue needs long, gentle, covered simmering to break down. Stopping early leaves the meat tough, while a hard boil can toughen the muscle fibres and make the sauce cloudy.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Arrowrootfits better
  3. Spinachfits better
  4. Onionthe original

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