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Spanish Stew

A rabbit stew cooked with onions, bacon, pepper, and coarse sea salt in an earthenware jar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Onion and pepper are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 68,474 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Spanish Stew

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Take a deep earthenware jar.

  2. Fill the jar with alternating layers of sliced onion and rabbit, seasoning each layer with pepper and coarse sea salt.

  3. Lay slices of bacon on the topmost layer.

  4. Cover the jar securely with two or three folds of greased paper.

Cook

  1. Place the jar, almost up to its neck, in a saucepan of boiling water.

  2. Keep it boiling for two and a half hours.

  3. The onions will provide enough moisture to stew the rabbit and serve as gravy.

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. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

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

  2. Onion + rabbittop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,292 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  3. Rabbit + peppertop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,334 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-pentylpyridine (fat).

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

What each ingredient does

Rabbit
Provides the meat that becomes tender as it stews slowly in its own juices.
Sliced onion
Releases moisture as it cooks, stewing the rabbit and forming the gravy.
Slices of bacon
Lays fat over the top layer, adding richness and savoury flavour as it cooks.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Mustardfits better
  3. Spinachfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against rabbit, pepper. 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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