Skip to main content
Main

Brown Rabbit Soup

A hearty soup made from rabbit joints, onions, carrots, parsley, and peppercorns, simmered in boiling water.

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

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

  1. Flour and lightly fry the rabbit joints.

  2. Add the fried onions and pour in the boiling water.

  3. Stir in the salt, skimming off any scum that rises.

  4. Add the parsley, carrots, and peppercorns.

Simmer and finish

  1. Boil gently for 5 to 5.5 hours.

  2. Taste and add more salt if needed.

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

  4. Reheat the soup and serve with fried bread.

  5. Optionally, thicken with rice flour or wheaten flour and add mushroom catsup or sauce.

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. Rice + mushroomtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,515 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-nonadienal (fatty, green).

  5. Onion + parsleytop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25,843 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 rich flavour that form the body of the soup.
Flour
Coats the rabbit joints so they brown lightly and help thicken the soup.
Onions
Fried to a clear brown, they add sweetness and deep savoury colour to the broth.
Carrots
Release natural sweetness and body into the long-simmered broth.

The step that matters

Skimming the scum and the fat. Scum rising at the start and fat left after cooling both cloud the broth and taste greasy. Skimming early and chilling the strained soup lets the fat set on top so it can be removed cleanly.

Swap the onion

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

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

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

You might also like

Brown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesCarrot SoupCarrot Soup134 recipesRice FrittersRice Fritters84 recipesWhite BreadWhite Bread80 recipes