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A rabbit stew made with onions, carrots, parsley, peppercorns, and water, simmered until tender.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,053 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Modern Cookery

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Fry the onions until golden.

  2. In a large pot, combine the fried onions, water, salt, carrots, parsley, and peppercorns.

  3. Add the rabbits to the pot.

Cook

  1. Simmer for 5 to 5.5 hours until the rabbits are tender.

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 + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

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

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

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

  3. Onion + parsleytop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25,843 recipes

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

  4. Rabbit + oniontop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,292 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Rabbit + parsleytop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together602 recipes

    Shared aroma: sabinene (woody, terpenic).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Rabbits
Provide the meat that becomes tender through long, slow simmering.
Onions
Frying them until golden adds sweetness and savoury depth to the broth.
Carrots
Add natural sweetness and body to the broth as they soften.

The step that matters

Simmer slowly until the rabbits are tender. Rabbit meat is lean and its connective tissue needs long, gentle simmering to break down. Rushing the cook or boiling hard can leave the meat tough and stringy, so keep the liquid at a gentle simmer for the full time.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Parsnipfits better
  2. Turnipfits better
  3. Shallotfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against rabbit, carrot, parsley. 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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