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Rabbit Soup

A soup made by stewing rabbit with onions, carrot, turnip, peppercorns, sea salt, and water, then pressing and boiling again.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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

Prepare

  1. Wash the rabbit and cut it into pieces.

Make the soup

  1. Stew the rabbit with the vegetables in 2 quarts of water until the meat slips from the bones.

  2. Press the meat and vegetables through a colander and return them to the stock.

  3. Season with pepper and coarse sea salt.

  4. Boil once.

  5. Serve hot.

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. Rabbit + turniptop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together117 recipes

    Shared aroma: geraniol (rose, geranium).

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

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

What each ingredient does

Rabbit
Provides the meat that becomes tender and is pressed back into the soup.
Onions
Add sweetness and aroma to the stock as they stew.
Carrot
Adds sweetness and body to the stock as it cooks down.
Turnip
Adds body and mild sweetness to the stock as it cooks down.

The step that matters

Stew until the meat slips from the bones. Slow simmering breaks down connective tissue so the meat becomes tender and releases flavor into the stock. Stopping early leaves tough meat and a thin, less flavorful broth.

Swap the onion

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against rabbit, 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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