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Boiled Rabbit

A boiled rabbit served with soubise sauce and gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Rabbit and pork work together. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 832 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Boiled Rabbit

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Choose a young rabbit with smooth, sharp claws or white inside fat.

  2. In a pot, add the rabbit, pickled pork or bacon, onion, peppercorns, and enough milk to cover.

Cook and serve

  1. Bring to a boil, then reduce heat and simmer until the rabbit is cooked through.

  2. Serve the rabbit on a hot dish, garnished with watercress.

  3. Remove skewers and serve with soubise sauce and gravy in separate sauce-boats.

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. Rabbit + porktop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together832 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  2. Pork + oniontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,214 recipes

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

  3. Pork + milktop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,386 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-heptenal (creamy, biscuit).

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

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Rabbit + saucetop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together330 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Rabbit
Provides the lean meat that becomes tender during slow simmering.
Pickled pork or bacon
Adds salty, savoury fat that flavours the cooking liquid and the meat.
Milk
Covers the rabbit during simmering, keeping the lean meat moist and gently cooked.
Onion
Adds aromatic sweetness to the cooking liquid.

The step that matters

Simmering until cooked through. Lean rabbit meat dries out and toughens if it boils hard. Gentle simmering in liquid cooks it evenly and keeps it moist.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (rabbit, pork, sauce, milk):

  1. Potatofits better
  2. Mustardfits better
  3. Capsicumfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against rabbit, pork, sauce, milk. 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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