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Fricassee of Rabbit

A rabbit stew with onions, turnip, pickled pork or bacon, milk, thyme, nutmeg, pepper, and a flour‑thickened sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Turnip and thyme match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,352 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Fricassee of Rabbit

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the rabbit

  1. Put the rabbit in a saucepan of boiling water with onions, turnip, and pickled pork or bacon.

  2. Boil for 2 minutes, remove scum, then simmer for about 1 hour until tender.

Make the sauce

  1. For the sauce, boil an onion and thyme in milk until reduced to ½ pint.

  2. Add nutmeg, pepper, and salt to taste.

  3. Mix flour in cold milk or cream, stir into boiling milk until thickened.

Finish and serve

  1. Add rabbit joints to the sauce and heat for 15 minutes without boiling.

  2. Serve the rabbit neatly on a dish.

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. Turnip + thymetop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,352 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Thyme + nutmegtop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,907 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  3. Thyme + peppertop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  4. Onion + turniptop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Rabbit + porktop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together832 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; simmering it until tender breaks down connective tissue.
Flour
Thickens the milk sauce as its starch swells when heated.
Milk
Forms the base of the sauce, giving it a creamy, mellow body.
Pickled pork or bacon
Adds salty, savoury flavour to the cooking liquid and rabbit.

The step that matters

Stir the flour mixture into boiling milk. Flour must be fully dispersed in cold liquid before heating, or it forms lumps. Once the starch is in the hot milk it thickens the sauce, so stirring steadily as it heats keeps it smooth.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (rabbit, turnip, pork, milk, thyme, nutmeg, pepper):

  1. Parsnipfits better
  2. Potatofits better
  3. Leekfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against rabbit, turnip, pork, milk, thyme, nutmeg, 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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