Skip to main content
Main

Rabbit, Spanish Way of Cooking

A slow‑cooked rabbit stew layered with onions, bacon, and seasonings, simmered for two hours without added water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Onion and pepper are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 68,474 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Rabbit, Spanish Way of Cooking

Oven, in the book's wordsA slack oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. In a stewpan or earthenware pot with a tight-fitting lid, place a layer of sliced onion at the bottom.

  2. Season the rabbit pieces with salt, pepper, and any other desired seasonings, then layer them on top of the onions.

  3. Continue layering with onion and rabbit until all ingredients are used, finishing with a layer of onion.

  4. Top with thin slices of bacon or ham.

Cook and serve

  1. Cover the pot and cook over moderate heat for 2 hours without adding water.

  2. If desired, add 1 teaspoon of flour to the seasoning for thickening 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. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

    Shared aroma: acetaldehyde (pungent, ethereal).

  4. Rabbit + hamtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together273 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Onion + flourtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together32,460 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Rabbits
Provide the main meat, which becomes tender during the long covered simmer.
Spanish onions
Break down during slow covered cooking, sweetening the juices and forming the base of the stew.
Bacon or ham
Renders fat over the layers, adding savoury flavour and moisture to the meat.
Flour
Thickens the cooking juices into a lightly body-rich sauce when added to the seasoning.

The step that matters

Cover and cook without adding water. The tight lid traps steam so the onions and meat release and reabsorb their own juices. Adding water would dilute the flavour and stop the stew from concentrating.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Mustardfits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Turnipfits better
  4. Onionthe original

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

You might also like

Rabbit PattiesRabbit Patties6 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipes