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Brown Rabbit Soup

A hearty soup made from rabbit joints simmered with onions, carrots, parsley, and peppercorns.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and carrot 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. Flour the rabbit joints and lightly fry them.

Make the soup

  1. Add the fried onions, then pour in the boiling water.

  2. Stir in the salt and remove any scum that rises.

  3. Add the parsley, carrots, and peppercorns.

  4. Boil gently for 5 to 5.5 hours, adding more salt if needed.

Strain and finish

  1. Strain the soup and let it cool to skim off the fat.

  2. Reheat the soup.

  3. Optionally, thicken with rice flour or browned flour.

  4. Add mushroom catsup or sauce, and a few drops of wine or vinegar.

  5. 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. Parsley + carrottop 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. Carrot + ricetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,477 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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

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

  5. Onion + ricetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,433 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

Rabbit
Provides the meat and, as it simmers, the body and rich flavour of the broth.
Flour
Coats the rabbit so it browns in the pan and helps thicken the soup slightly.
Onions
Fried to a clear brown, they add sweetness and deep savoury flavour to the broth.
Carrots
Add natural sweetness and body to the broth during the long simmer.

The step that matters

Boil gently for 5 to 5.5 hours. A gentle simmer, not a rolling boil, lets collagen and flavour release slowly from the rabbit while keeping the broth clear. Boiling hard breaks up the meat and clouds the liquid.

Swap the onion

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

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

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