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Rabbit Soup

A hearty soup made with rabbit, bacon, vegetables, and stock, simmered until tender.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 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 ↓

Rabbit Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Brown the meat and vegetables

  1. Heat butter in a stewpan.

  2. Fry rabbit pieces until browned.

  3. Remove rabbit pieces and keep warm.

  4. Fry onion until slightly softened.

  5. Add flour.

  6. Cook slowly until browned.

Simmer the soup

  1. Stir in stock or water.

  2. Bring to a gentle boil for 10 minutes.

  3. Add salt.

  4. Add carrot.

  5. Add turnip.

  6. Add bacon.

  7. Add peppercorns.

  8. Return rabbit to stewpan.

  9. Cover.

  10. Cook gently for about 2 hours until tender.

Serve

  1. Serve hot.

  2. Strain soup over rabbit.

  3. Garnish with boiled turnip and carrot.

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. Onion + turniptop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Onion + carrottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together21,601 recipes

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

  4. Flour + turniptop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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 during the long gentle simmer.
Bacon
Adds savory fat and smoky flavor that seasons the broth.
Butter
Carries the frying of the rabbit and onion and adds richness.
Flour
Browned in the fat, it thickens the stock and adds toasty flavor.
Onion
Softened in the fat, it builds a sweet aromatic base for the broth.
Stock or water
Forms the liquid that extracts flavor from the meat and vegetables.

The step that matters

Cook the flour until browned. Flour must cook in the fat long enough to lose its raw taste and gain nutty color. Undercooked flour leaves the soup pasty and floury, while well-browned flour gives body and depth.

Swap the onion

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against rabbit, butter, flour, 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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