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Rabbits Brown

A rabbit stew simmered in a brown sauce made with butter, anchovy, ketchup, and lemon pickle.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Anchovy and ketchup match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 479 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Rabbits Brown

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the rabbit

  1. Fry the rabbit pieces in butter until light brown.

  2. Transfer them to a stew pan with water, lemon, anchovy, browning, ketchup, lemon pickle, cayenne pepper, and salt.

Stew and finish

  1. Stew over low heat until cooked through.

  2. Thicken the gravy with butter and flour, then strain it.

  3. Serve the rabbits with the gravy poured over them and garnish with sliced lemon.

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. Anchovy + ketchuptop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together479 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  2. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Butter + anchovytop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,697 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

    Shared aroma: acetaldehyde (pungent, ethereal).

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

Rabbits
Provide the main meat, which becomes tender through slow stewing.
Butter and flour
Thicken the gravy so it coats the rabbit pieces.
Anchovy
Adds savoury depth to the gravy, though it is not identifiable as a taste in the finished dish.
Browning
Darkens the gravy and adds colour to the stew.

The step that matters

Frying the rabbit until light brown. Browning meat in fat creates flavour through the Maillard reaction, which adds savoury depth to the finished stew. Stopping at light brown keeps the surface from drying out before the long stew.

“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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