Skip to main content
Main

Rabbit Soup

A hearty soup made with rabbit, stock, wine, and seasonings, finished with a liver mixture.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Beef and onion are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 17,092 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Rabbit Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the soup

  1. Place the rabbit pieces in a pot and cover with water. Bring to a boil slowly, skimming off any scum.

  2. Once the scum stops rising, add 2 quarts of prepared stock flavored with onions, white peppercorns, and mace.

  3. Simmer gently until the meat is tender, then refrigerate overnight.

Finish and serve

  1. Before reheating, remove the fat from the surface.

  2. Take out the liver, pass it through a sieve, and moisten with a little flour and butter.

  3. Add the liver mixture to the soup along with port wine, white wine, walnut ketchup, and lemon pickle.

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. Beef + oniontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,092 recipes

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

  2. Rabbit + beeftop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together252 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  3. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Beef + teatop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together417 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methyl-3-(methyldithio)furan (thiamin, meat).

  5. Butter + port winetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,499 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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 during long, gentle simmering.
Butter
Combines with flour to form a roux-style paste that thickens the soup.
Flour
Thickens the liver mixture and the soup through starch gelatinization.
Liver (in the method)
Passed through a sieve, it adds body and rich flavor to the soup.
Port wine
Adds sweetness and depth of flavor to the finished soup.

The step that matters

Simmer gently until the meat is tender. Boiling hard toughens meat proteins and can cloud the broth, while a gentle simmer lets collagen slowly break down into tender meat and a clear, well-flavored stock.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (rabbit, beef, onion, flour, butter, tea, port wine):

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Garlicfits better
  3. Nutmegfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against rabbit, beef, onion, flour, butter, tea, port wine. 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.

More rabbit soup recipes

Brown 10Curry 4 See all 103 →

You might also like

Lemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesRoast BeefRoast Beef211 recipesBeef LoafBeef Loaf175 recipesCorned BeefCorned Beef87 recipes