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Rabbit Stew

A stew of rabbit pieces simmered in salted water with 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.

Cook and thicken

  1. Place the rabbits in a pot and cover with cold water. Boil until tender.

  2. Season with salt and pepper.

  3. In a separate bowl, mix the butter and flour until smooth, then stir 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 rabbits 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 protein, which becomes tender through long simmering in water.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, giving the gravy a smooth, rounded mouthfeel.
Flour
Thickens the cooking liquid into a gravy as it is stirred in.

The step that matters

Stirring the butter and flour into the gravy. Mixing flour with butter first helps prevent lumps. Stirring it smooth into hot liquid lets starch granules swell evenly, so the gravy thickens without clumps.

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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