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White Stock

A clear rabbit stock made with water, butter, onions, turnip, herbs, spices, and rabbit meat.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Turnip and celery are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,418 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

White Stock

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Tie the herbs and celery seed in a piece of muslin.

  2. In a large pan, combine water, butter, onions, turnip, herbs, celery seed, cloves, mace, pepper, and salt.

Simmer and strain

  1. Stir occasionally until the water boils, then simmer until the vegetables are tender.

  2. Open the tin of rabbit and add the contents to the saucepan.

  3. Simmer gently until the meat separates from the bones, then strain through a sieve.

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. Turnip + celerytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,418 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Clove + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  3. Celery + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together16,012 recipes

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

  4. Onion + turniptop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Turnip + clovetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Rabbit
Supplies the meat and bones that give the stock its body and flavour.
Butter
Adds richness and carries flavour from the aromatics into the liquid.
Onions
Release sweetness and savoury depth as they simmer in the liquid.
Turnip
Adds a mild, earthy sweetness to the background flavour of the stock.

The step that matters

Simmer gently until the meat separates from the bones. A hard boil can make the stock cloudy and emulsify fat into it, so a gentle simmer gives a clearer, cleaner stock while the collagen in the bones slowly releases body.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (rabbit, butter, onion, turnip, celery, clove, pepper):

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Winter savoryfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against rabbit, butter, onion, turnip, celery, clove, 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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