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Rabbit, Ragout of

A savory rabbit ragout simmered with onions, bacon, and herbs in a thickened sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 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 ↓

Rabbit, Ragout of

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Melt the butter in a saucepan.

  2. Fry the sliced onions in the butter until browned.

  3. Remove the onions from the pan.

  4. Mix the flour with the melted butter and gradually add stock or water until the sauce reaches a thick cream consistency.

Simmer and serve

  1. Add the rabbit joints, bacon, bay leaf, lemon slice, pepper, and salt to the sauce.

  2. Simmer gently until the rabbit is tender, about 1.5 to 2 hours.

  3. Place the rabbit pieces on a dish, strain the sauce over them, and serve hot.

  4. Optionally, add a glass of wine to the sauce 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. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  2. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

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

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

  4. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Cream + rabbittop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together409 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonanone (fruity, floral).

Butter and flour 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

Butter
Carries the onion flavour and forms the base of the roux that thickens the sauce.
Onions
Browning in butter adds sweetness and savoury depth to the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the butter and stock into a smooth, cream-thick sauce.
Rabbit
Lean meat that becomes tender and succulent during long, gentle simmering.
Bacon
Adds smoky, salty fat that flavours the sauce and the rabbit as it simmers.

The step that matters

Simmer gently until the rabbit is tender. A rapid boil toughens the proteins and can break the flour-thickened sauce. Gentle, steady heat lets the connective tissue soften slowly so the meat stays moist and tender.

Swap the onion

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

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

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