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Rabbit, Larded

A rabbit stew with a roux-based sauce, cooked with vegetables, peppercorns, salt, milk, butter, and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Rabbit, Larded

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the rabbit

  1. Cover the rabbit with stock and bring to a boil.

  2. Add vegetables, peppercorns, and a little salt; cover and cook gently for about 1.5 hours until tender.

  3. Add milk occasionally to replace stock.

Make the sauce

  1. Melt butter, add flour, stir and cook gently without browning; set aside.

  2. Remove rabbit, keep it hot, strain stock, and add ½ pint to the flour and butter mixture.

  3. Stir until boiling, then simmer gently for 10 minutes.

  4. Pass vegetables through a fine sieve and stir puree into the sauce.

Finish and serve

  1. Season to taste, return rabbit to the sauce, heat thoroughly, and serve.

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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Rabbit + flourtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,067 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetaldehyde (pungent, ethereal).

  4. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Rabbit + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,448 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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 long, gentle cooking in liquid.
Butter
Combines with flour to form the roux that thickens the sauce and adds richness.
Flour
Thickens the sauce when cooked with butter into a roux.
Milk
Adds creaminess and body to the cooking liquid, replacing stock as it reduces.
Prepared vegetables
Flavour the cooking stock, and when pureed they thicken and enrich the sauce.

The step that matters

Cook the roux without browning. Cooking butter and flour gently keeps the starch able to thicken evenly and avoids a toasted, bitter flavour that would spoil the pale sauce.

“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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