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Wild Rabbits

A hearty rabbit soup made with pickled pork, onions, turnip, and rabbit, thickened with cornflour or oatmeal.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Onion and turnip match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,585 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Wild Rabbits

Ingredients

Directions

Make the broth

  1. Combine pickled pork, two onions, and turnip with hot water in a large pot. Simmer for 1 hour.

  2. Wash rabbit thoroughly and add it with cold water to the pot. Simmer for another hour.

  3. Remove rabbit, pork, and vegetables from the pot. Cut rabbit into legs, shoulders, and meat from the back. Set aside.

  4. Slice remaining two onions and fry until moderately brown. Add them, along with rabbit's head and bones, back into the broth.

  5. Simmer broth for 2 hours, skimming surface occasionally.

Finish and serve

  1. Thicken soup with cornflour or oatmeal mixed with a little cold water. Add salt if needed.

  2. Strain soup through fine sieve, return to pot for a few minutes, serve hot. Optionally add Yorkshire Relish before serving.

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 + turniptop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Pork + rabbittop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together832 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  3. Pork + oniontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,214 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. Pork + turniptop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,358 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methylbutyraldehyde (malty, chocolate).

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

What each ingredient does

Rabbit
Provides the main meat and flavour of the soup, along with the bones and head that enrich the broth.
Pickled pork
Adds salty, savoury depth to the broth as it simmers.
Onions
Build sweetness and savoury flavour in the broth, and browning adds richer taste.
Cornflour or oatmeal
Thickens the soup so it becomes body-rich rather than watery.

The step that matters

Thickening the soup. Starch must be mixed smoothly with cold water before adding, because dry starch clumps in hot liquid. Starch then swells as the soup heats, thickening it evenly.

Swap the turnip

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

  1. Potatofits better
  2. Mustardfits better
  3. Turnipthe original
  4. Chivefits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against pork, onion, 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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