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Boiled Rabbit

A boiled rabbit seasoned with salt and vegetables, served with onion or maitre‑d’hotel sauce and bacon rolls.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and turnip match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,002 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Boiled Rabbit

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Truss the rabbit, fastening the head at the side.

Boil

  1. Boil gently in water with salt and the sliced vegetables for about 1 hour, depending on size.

Serve

  1. Pour onion or maitre‑d’hotel sauce over the rabbit.

  2. Garnish with small rolls of fat bacon.

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 + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Turnip + oniontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Carrot + oniontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together21,601 recipes

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

  4. Rabbit + turniptop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together117 recipes

    Shared aroma: geraniol (rose, geranium).

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

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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 gentle simmering rather than high heat.
Onion sauce or maitre-d’hotel sauce
Adds moisture and savoury flavour to the cooked meat at serving.
Fat bacon
Adds fat and savoury flavour as a garnish that softens slightly against the warm meat.

The step that matters

Boil gently. A gentle simmer keeps the water below a hard boil, so the meat cooks evenly and stays tender instead of toughening and falling apart. Cooking time depends on the size of the rabbit.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Parsnipfits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Beetrootfits better
  4. Onionthe original

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