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Spiced Rabbit

A stew of rabbit seasoned with salt, vinegar, butter, onion, bay leaf, peppercorns, celery root, and thickened with flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Onion and celery are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 18,518 recipes. Both carry guaiacol, which smells smoky, sweet. The science ↓

Spiced Rabbit

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the rabbit

  1. Cut up the rabbit and soak it in a mixture of salt and water for 1 hour.

  2. Pour vinegar over the rabbit and let it marinate overnight.

Make the stew

  1. In a deep stew pan, melt the butter and sauté the chopped onion.

  2. Add the bay leaf, peppercorns, and celery root to the pan.

  3. Place the rabbit in the stew, adding some of the vinegar from the marinade and a little salt.

  4. Cook until the rabbit is tender, then thicken the sauce with browned flour.

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 + celerytop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,518 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

    Shared aroma: acetaldehyde (pungent, ethereal).

  5. Vinegar + oniontop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,226 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

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

Rabbit
Provides the main meat, which becomes tender through long slow cooking.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, and helps soften and flavour the onion at the start.
Onion
Builds a sweet, savoury base for the stew as it cooks down in the butter.
Flour
Thickens the sauce so it clings to the rabbit rather than running thin.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour and helps tenderise the rabbit during marinating.

The step that matters

Cook until the rabbit is tender, then thicken the sauce with browned flour. Rabbit is lean and can turn dry or tough if cooked too hard or too fast. Gentle, low heat lets connective tissue break down slowly. Browned flour thickens less than raw flour, so it needs enough simmering time to cook out and lose any raw taste.

Swap the celery

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (rabbit, vinegar, egg, butter, onion, flour):

  1. Capersfits better
  2. Garlicfits better
  3. Tarragonfits better
  4. Celerythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against rabbit, vinegar, egg, butter, onion, 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.

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