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Fricassee of Rabbit

A stew of rabbit with carrots, turnips, onions, celery, eschalot, herbs, spices, and stock, finished with a vegetable puree sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 ingredients
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Why it works: Thyme and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,057 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Fricassee of Rabbit

Ingredients

Directions

Stew

  1. Combine the rabbit, carrots, turnips, onions, celery, eschalot, thyme, parsley, salt, Cayenne pepper, mace, nutmeg, and cloves in a stewpan.

  2. Cover with consommé or stock and stew gently for 45 minutes.

Make the sauce

  1. Remove the vegetables and puree them, keeping them hot for another 30 minutes.

  2. Take out the meat.

  3. Strain the sauce.

Serve

  1. Arrange the meat on a dish.

  2. Cover the meat with the vegetable puree.

  3. Pour the strained sauce over the dish.

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. Thyme + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

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

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

  3. Carrot + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Celery + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,810 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

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 during slow stewing.
Carrots
Add sweetness and body to the stock and the puréed vegetable sauce.
Onions
Build savoury depth and body as they soften into the stewing liquid.
Turnips
Add body and mild sweetness to the puréed vegetable sauce.
Consommé or good stock
Forms the cooking liquid that gently braises the rabbit and becomes the sauce.

The step that matters

Stew gently for 45 minutes. Gentle heat keeps the liquid from boiling hard, which would toughen the meat and cloud the sauce. Slow simmering lets the connective tissue break down so the rabbit becomes tender.

Swap the onion

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against rabbit, carrot, turnip, celery, thyme, parsley, pepper. 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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