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Hassenpfeffer, or Sour Rabbit

A pickled rabbit stew with vinegar, onions, cloves, pepper, and lard.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 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 ↓

Hassenpfeffer, or Sour Rabbit

Ingredients

Directions

Marinate

  1. Place the cut rabbit in a crock and cover with vinegar.

  2. Add sliced onions, whole cloves, black pepper, and salt.

  3. Let it stand overnight.

Cook and thicken

  1. In the morning, boil the mixture, adding enough water to prevent it from cooking dry.

  2. Heat lard in a skillet. Add flour. Brown to a dark color while stirring constantly.

  3. Stir the browned mixture into the rabbit and boil for about ten minutes.

  4. Add lemon slices if desired.

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. Clove + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  3. Clove + lemontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,150 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

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

  5. Onion + clovetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together16,901 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonanone (fruity, floral).

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

What each ingredient does

Rabbit
Main protein that becomes tender during the long vinegar soak and simmer.
Vinegar
Acidity that sours the meat and helps tenderize it during the overnight soak.
Lard
Fat that carries flavor and helps the flour brown in the skillet.
Flour
Browned in fat, it thickens the cooking liquid and adds a toasted, nutty flavor.
Onions
Sweetness and aromatic flavor that mellow into the sour marinade.

The step that matters

Browning the flour in lard. Flour must be stirred constantly over heat until dark brown; if it scorches it turns bitter, and if pale it will not add the deep color and flavor or thicken the sauce well.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against rabbit, vinegar, onion, clove, pepper, 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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