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Rabbit Soup

A soup made from rabbit bones, vegetables, spices, beef stock, port wine, and forcemeat balls.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and turnip match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,002 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Rabbit Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the soup

  1. Fry the rabbit bones and odds in 1 ounce of butter with the sliced carrot, turnip, minced onions, cloves, and spices to taste.

  2. Add the mixture to 1 quart of beef stock and simmer for 2 hours.

  3. Strain out the bones and pass the soup through a sieve.

Finish and serve

  1. Just before serving, add 1 tablespoon of port wine and 12 previously poached forcemeat balls.

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. Carrot + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Carrot + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,873 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  3. Turnip + oniontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Turnip + clovetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Carrot + oniontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together21,601 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Rabbit bones and odds
Release gelatin and deep meaty flavour into the stock during long simmering.
Butter
Carries fat-soluble aromas from the vegetables and spices and adds richness.
Beef stock
Forms the liquid base and adds savoury depth to the soup.
Onions
Add sweetness and aromatic base flavour as they soften in the fat.
Port wine
Adds sweetness and fruity aroma at the end, rounding the flavour.

The step that matters

Simmering for 2 hours. A gentle simmer extracts flavour and gelatin from the bones without clouding the broth. Boiling hard emulsifies fats and makes the soup cloudy and greasy.

Swap the clove

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (rabbit, butter, carrot, turnip, onion, beef, port wine):

  1. Celeryfits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Thymefits better
  4. Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against rabbit, butter, carrot, turnip, onion, beef, port 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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