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Boiled Rabbit

A boiled rabbit served with onion sauce and chopped liver.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Rabbit and onion are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,292 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Boiled Rabbit

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash the rabbit and remove the heart, liver, and kidneys.

  2. Truss the rabbit by taking the fore legs backwards and the back legs forwards.

  3. Push a skewer through the rabbit, twist the head to one side, and secure with a skewer and string.

Boil and serve

  1. Prepare a pan of boiling water and gently boil the rabbit for 1 to 1.5 hours, depending on its age.

  2. Once tender, remove the skewers and place the rabbit on a hot dish.

  3. Cover with onion sauce and garnish with chopped liver that has been cooked for 30 minutes before the rabbit was ready.

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

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  2. Rabbit + livertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together233 recipes

    Shared aroma: geraniol (rose, geranium).

  3. Onion + livertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,420 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  4. Rabbit + saucetop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together330 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  5. Onion + saucetop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together10,474 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

Onion and sauce barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 10,474 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 gentle simmering.
Onion sauce
Adds moisture and savoury flavour to the meat when spooned over it.
Chopped liver
Adds a rich, savoury flavour as a garnish.

The step that matters

Gentle boiling of the rabbit. Boiling vigorously can toughen and break down the meat unevenly, so the water should be kept at a gentle simmer. Time depends on the rabbit's age, so check for tenderness before removing it.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (rabbit, sauce, liver):

  1. Mustardfits better
  2. Shallotfits about as well
  3. Onionthe original
  4. Welsh onionfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against rabbit, sauce, liver. 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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