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Fricasse of Rabbit

A rabbit stew with onions, flour, stock, and spices, finished with lemon slices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon 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 ↓

Fricasse of Rabbit

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash the rabbit in warm water.

  2. Dry the rabbit.

  3. Dip the rabbit joints in flour, salt, and pepper.

Fry and make the gravy

  1. Heat the dripping in a pan.

  2. Fry the rabbit until golden.

  3. In the same fat, fry the chopped onions until brown.

  4. Add the remaining flour to the onions. Cook until brown.

  5. Pour in the stock. Stir until it boils.

  6. Add the spices and the fried rabbit. Simmer gently for 1 hour.

Serve

  1. Transfer the rabbit to a hot dish.

  2. Strain the gravy over it.

  3. Garnish with thin slices of lemon before serving.

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. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  2. Pepper + oniontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  4. Rabbit + flourtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,067 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetaldehyde (pungent, ethereal).

  5. Rabbit + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together626 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

What each ingredient does

Rabbit
Is the main protein, browned and then gently simmered until tender.
Flour
Coats the rabbit and thickens the stock into a gravy as it cooks.
Onions
Fried until brown to add sweetness and savoury depth to the gravy.
Stock
Forms the liquid base of the gravy and carries the flavour during simmering.
Dripping
Fat for frying that browns the rabbit and onions, adding richness and flavour.

The step that matters

Frying the rabbit until golden. Browning builds flavour through the Maillard reaction. Rabbit is lean, so it can dry out or turn bland if rushed or overcooked before the simmer.

Swap the onion

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

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

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