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Rabbit, Boiled

A boiled rabbit cooked with onion, carrot, turnip, bouquet garni, peppercorns, and salt, served with onion sauce and bacon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and thyme match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,057 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Rabbit, Boiled

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare and cook

  1. Wash and truss the rabbit.

  2. Put the rabbit into boiling water.

  3. When the water re-boils, add the vegetables cut into large pieces, bouquet garni, peppercorns, and salt.

  4. Cook gently for about 1 hour, depending on the age and size of the rabbit.

Serve

  1. Remove the rabbit and serve on a hot dish, coated with onion sauce.

  2. Serve the remaining sauce in a sauceboat and the bacon on a separate dish, or use small rolls as garnish.

  3. The cooking liquid can be served as broth or made into a white soup.

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 + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

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

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

  3. Carrot + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Turnip + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,842 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Carrot + thymetop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4,563 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

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

What each ingredient does

Rabbit
Provides the main meat, which becomes tender through gentle simmering.
Onion
Adds savory sweetness and aroma to the cooking liquid and flavors the broth.
Carrot
Adds sweetness and aroma to the cooking liquid and the resulting broth.
Turnip
Adds mild sweetness and body to the cooking liquid and the resulting broth.
Bacon
Adds salty, savory fat as a garnish served alongside the rabbit.

The step that matters

Cook gently for about 1 hour. Keeping the water at a gentle simmer rather than a hard boil keeps the meat tender and prevents the proteins from tightening and toughening. Timing should account for the rabbit's age and size, since older animals need longer to become tender.

Swap the onion

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

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

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