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Rabbit Stew

A stew of rabbit with onion, carrot, turnip, bacon, and stock, simmered until tender.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 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 Stew

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. In a pot, sauté the onion until slightly browned.

  2. Add the stock or water and bring to a gentle boil for 10 minutes.

Cook

  1. Season with salt, then add the carrot, turnip, bacon, and peppercorns.

  2. Return the rabbit to the pot, cover, and cook gently for about 2 hours until tender.

Serve

  1. Serve hot, strained over the rabbit, garnished with boiled turnip and carrot.

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. Turnip + rabbittop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together117 recipes

    Shared aroma: geraniol (rose, geranium).

  5. Onion + rabbittop 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 main protein, which becomes tender through long, gentle simmering.
Bacon
Its rendered fat adds richness and savoury flavour to the broth.
Onion
Browning it builds sweet, savoury depth that flavours the stew.
Carrot
Adds natural sweetness and body to the stew as it softens.
Turnip
Adds mild sweetness and soft texture as it cooks down.

The step that matters

Return the rabbit and cook gently for about 2 hours. Rabbit is lean and its connective tissue needs long, low, gentle heat to break down and become tender. A hard boil toughens the meat and makes the broth cloudy, so the liquid should only barely simmer.

Swap the onion

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

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

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