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Rabbit Stew

A stew of rabbit pieces simmered in water with pepper, salt, butter, flour, and optional lemon juice and onions.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon 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 Stew

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Soak the rabbit pieces in cold salted water for 1 hour.

Make the stew

  1. Place the rabbits in a pot with enough cold water to cover them and boil until tender.

  2. Season with pepper and coarse sea salt.

  3. Mix the butter and flour to form a smooth paste, then stir it into the gravy.

  4. Add lemon juice for extra flavor if desired.

  5. If using onions, boil them separately and add to the gravy before serving.

Serve

  1. Serve the rabbit and gravy together on a large platter.

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. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  2. Pepper + oniontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

    Shared aroma: acetaldehyde (pungent, ethereal).

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

Rabbits
Provide the main meat, which becomes tender through long simmering in water.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, carrying flavor through the gravy.
Flour
Thickens the cooking liquid into a smooth gravy when mixed with butter.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavor of the gravy.

The step that matters

Mix the butter and flour into a smooth paste. Lumps form if the flour is dropped in dry. Blending it with butter first lets the starch disperse evenly, so it thickens the gravy smoothly when stirred in.

Swap the lemon

The recipe marks lemon as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (rabbit, pepper, butter, flour, onion):

  1. Lemonthe original
  2. Mangofits about as well
  3. Limefits less well
  4. Avocadofits less well

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