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Simple Way to Cook a Rabbit

A rabbit stew cooked with bacon, onion, parsley, and boiling water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 34,122 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Simple Way to Cook a Rabbit

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the rabbit

  1. Soak the rabbit in saltwater for 15 minutes after washing it.

  2. Keep the liver, heart, and head, removing the eyes.

  3. Dry the rabbit.

  4. Divide it into pieces.

Make the stew

  1. Heat the dripping in a stewpan until very hot.

  2. Fry the pieces until brown in the hot fat.

  3. Add the onion and parsley, along with the head, heart, and liver.

  4. Season with salt and pepper.

  5. Pour in the boiling water and stir gently until it just comes to a boil.

  6. Cover with a lid, reduce the heat, and simmer gently until tender.

Serve

  1. Fry the bacon just before serving.

  2. Arrange the bacon neatly around the rabbit.

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. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  2. Parsley + oniontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25,843 recipes

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

  3. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

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

  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

Rabbit
Forms the main body of the stew, becoming tender through slow simmering.
Dripping
Carries heat for browning the rabbit pieces and adds rich flavour.
Onion
Adds aromatic sweetness and flavour to the stewing liquid.
Bacon
Adds salty, smoky flavour and a crisp contrast when fried for serving.

The step that matters

Browning the rabbit in hot dripping. Searing the pieces in very hot fat creates browned surfaces through the Maillard reaction, which builds deeper savoury flavour. Pieces fried in fat that is not hot enough will steam and turn grey instead of browning.

Swap the onion

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

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

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