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Rabbit, Stewed, Brown

A rabbit stew cooked slowly with onion, celery, carrot, herbs, peppercorns, and browned flour for thickening.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Celery and carrot match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,173 recipes. Both carry myristicin, which smells spice, warm. The science ↓

Rabbit, Stewed, Brown

Oven, in the book's wordsA slack oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash, dry, and cut up the rabbit, dividing the legs into large pieces.

  2. Brown the joints in a little hot fat for added flavor, if desired.

Stew

  1. Add plain stock or the liquor from boiled meat and the chopped vegetables.

  2. Add a bunch of herbs, peppercorns, and 2 cloves.

  3. Cook very slowly for 1 to 2 hours, depending on the rabbit's age and size.

  4. Thicken the dish with browned flour and add store sauce or ketchup for extra flavor, if desired.

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. Celery + carrottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  2. Carrot + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,873 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  3. Onion + carrottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together21,601 recipes

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

  4. Celery + clovetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4,668 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-decalactone (peach, creamy).

  5. Onion + celerytop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,518 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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 during long, slow cooking.
Browned flour
Thickens the cooking liquid into a richer, smoother sauce.
Plain stock
Supplies the liquid that forms the body of the stew.

The step that matters

Cook very slowly. Gentle, low heat lets the connective tissue in the rabbit break down slowly, so the meat turns tender instead of tough and stringy. Rapid boiling toughens muscle fibers and can make the meat dry and the liquid cloudy.

Swap the carrot

The recipe marks carrot as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (rabbit, onion, celery, meat, clove, flour, sauce):

  1. Mustardfits better
  2. Shallotfits about as well
  3. Turnipfits about as well
  4. Carrotthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against rabbit, onion, celery, meat, clove, flour, sauce. 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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