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Rabbit Stewed in Milk

A rabbit stew cooked slowly in milk with mace, rice flour, salt, and white pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and rice are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,374 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Rabbit Stewed in Milk

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the rabbit

  1. Soak the rabbit in lukewarm water for 30 minutes.

  2. Cut the rabbit into joints and place in a stewpan with the milk and seasonings.

Stew

  1. Stew slowly until the rabbit is tender.

  2. Remove the rabbit from the stewpan.

Thicken and serve

  1. Thicken the milk with rice flour, stirring until it boils for a few minutes.

  2. Pour the thickened milk over the rabbit to serve.

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. Milk + ricetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,374 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  2. Mace + white peppertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,695 recipes

    Shared aroma: myrcene (balsamic, herbaceous).

  3. Rabbit + ricetop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together252 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  4. Rabbit + flourtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,067 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetaldehyde (pungent, ethereal).

  5. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Milk and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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 through slow, gentle stewing.
Milk
Forms the cooking liquid and, once thickened, the creamy sauce.
Rice flour
Thickens the milk as it heats, giving the sauce body.

The step that matters

Stewing slowly until tender. Gentle, low heat lets the connective tissue in the rabbit break down slowly. Boiling hard can toughen the meat and can make the milk split, so the liquid should only simmer.

Swap the white pepper

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (rabbit, milk, mace, rice, flour):

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Cinnamonfits better
  3. Turmericfits better
  4. White pepperthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against rabbit, milk, mace, rice, flour. 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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