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Rabbit Stew

A stew of rabbit with onion, garlic, bay leaves, cloves, olives, mushrooms, and optional butter and chili.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 ingredients
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Why it works: Onion and garlic match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 29,058 recipes. Both carry furaneol, which smells caramel, strawberry. The science ↓

Rabbit Stew

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Fry the onion, garlic, bay leaves, and cloves in ghee until golden.

  2. Add the rabbit and cook for a few minutes, dusting it with flour.

Simmer and finish

  1. Pour in enough water to cover the rabbit and add button onions, olives, and mushrooms.

  2. Season with salt and let it simmer gently for about one hour.

  3. If the stew is not thick enough, add butter rolled in flour.

  4. For extra flavor, add chopped green chili 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. Onion + garlictop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together29,058 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  2. Garlic + olivetop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25,665 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

  3. Garlic + mushroomtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,700 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

  4. Olive + mushroomtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,571 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans,trans-2,4-nonadienal (fatty, green).

  5. Onion + olivetop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together29,779 recipes

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

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 simmering.
Flour
Dusting on the rabbit helps it brown and, with butter, thickens the stew.
Ghee
Fat for frying the aromatics and browning the rabbit, adding a rich flavor.
Onion
Softens and sweetens as it fries, building the base flavor of the stew.
Button mushrooms
Add savory, earthy flavor and moisture to the simmering liquid.

The step that matters

Frying the onion, garlic, bay leaves, and cloves until golden. Browning the aromatics in ghee develops deeper flavor through caramelization and the Maillard reaction. Pale or burnt aromatics will flavor the whole stew, so they need steady, watchful heat.

Swap the clove

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (rabbit, onion, garlic, ghee, flour, olive, mushroom):

  1. Turmericfits better
  2. Thymefits better
  3. Cuminfits better
  4. Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against rabbit, onion, garlic, ghee, flour, olive, mushroom. 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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