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Rabbits

A stew of rabbits cooked with onions, carrots, water, salt, peppercorns, and parsley.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,053 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Rabbits

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Fry the onions in a pot until golden.

  2. Add the rabbits and brown them slightly.

Make the stew

  1. Pour in the water and bring to a boil.

  2. Add the carrots, salt, peppercorns, and parsley.

  3. Simmer until the rabbits are tender.

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 + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  2. Onion + carrottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together21,601 recipes

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

  3. Onion + parsleytop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25,843 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Rabbit + parsleytop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together602 recipes

    Shared aroma: sabinene (woody, terpenic).

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 and flavorful as it simmers in the broth.
Onions
Add sweetness and savory depth when fried golden at the start.
Carrots
Add natural sweetness and body to the broth as they cook.

The step that matters

Simmer until the rabbits are tender. Rabbit meat is lean and connective tissue needs long, gentle simmering to break down. Boiling hard can toughen the meat and make it stringy, so keep the liquid at a gentle simmer until fork-tender.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (rabbit, carrot, parsley):

  1. Parsnipfits better
  2. Turnipfits better
  3. Shallotfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against rabbit, carrot, parsley. 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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