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Brown Rabbit Soup

A hearty soup made from rabbits, onions, carrots, parsley, peppercorns, and salt, served with fried bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,053 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Brown Rabbit Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the rabbit

  1. Cut the rabbits into joints.

  2. Flour the rabbit joints.

  3. Fry the rabbit joints lightly.

  4. Fry the onions until they are a clear brown.

Make the soup

  1. Gradually pour the boiling water over the rabbits and onions.

  2. Add the salt.

  3. Skim off any scum that rises.

  4. Add the parsley, carrots, and peppercorns.

  5. Boil gently for 5 to 5.5 hours.

Strain and serve

  1. Strain the soup.

  2. Let it cool to skim off the fat.

  3. Reheat the soup.

  4. Serve with fried bread.

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

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

  2. Onion + carrottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together21,601 recipes

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

  3. Onion + parsleytop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25,843 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Parsley + breadtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,588 recipes

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

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 cooks down to give the soup its body and flavour.
Onions
Frying them to a brown colour adds sweetness and savoury depth to the broth.
Carrots
Add natural sweetness and body to the broth during the long simmer.
Parsley
Adds a fresh, herbal aroma to the simmering broth.

The step that matters

Boil gently for 5 to 5.5 hours. A gentle simmer keeps the broth clear and lets collagen and flavour slowly release from the bones and joints. A hard boil would emulsify fat into the liquid and cloud the soup.

Swap the onion

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against rabbit, carrot, parsley, bread. 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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