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Rabbit Stewed with Mushrooms

A rabbit stew flavored with anchovies or essence, milk, wine, and mushrooms, finished with lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 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 Stewed with Mushrooms

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Boil anchovies or essence in milk and water with pepper, salt, and onion.

  2. Cut up the rabbit and stew it gently until cooked.

  3. Strain the gravy, then add butter rolled in flour, wine, and mushrooms.

  4. Toss everything together and squeeze lemon juice over the rabbit or pour lemon pickle on it.

  5. Serve with the sauce and liver made into forcemeat balls.

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 + mushroomtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,525 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

  3. Wine + mushroomtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,632 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methoxy-4-propylphenol (allspice, anise).

  4. Onion + mushroomtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,626 recipes

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

  5. Pepper + oniontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

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

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 gentle, slow stewing.
Butter and flour
Rolled together, they thicken the strained gravy into a smooth sauce.
Milk
Adds body and richness to the cooking liquid that becomes the gravy.
Wine
Adds acidity and depth of flavour to the sauce.
Mushrooms
Add savoury, earthy flavour and a soft texture to the sauce.
Lemon juice or lemon pickle
Adds acidity that brightens the rich, savoury sauce.

The step that matters

Stew the rabbit gently until cooked. Rabbit is lean and dries out or toughens if it boils hard. Gentle, low heat lets the connective tissue soften slowly while the meat stays moist.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (milk, pepper, rabbit, butter, flour, wine, mushroom):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Potatofits better
  3. Capsicumfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, pepper, rabbit, butter, flour, wine, 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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