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Boiled Rabbit and Onion Sauce

A soup of rabbit simmered with split peas, celery, onions, carrots, and turnips, seasoned with sea salt and black pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 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 ↓

Boiled Rabbit and Onion Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Soak the split peas overnight in cold water.

  2. Remove any bad peas that float.

  3. Clean the rabbit by removing its insides and skin it.

Make the soup

  1. In a pot, bring the stock to a boil.

  2. Add the soaked peas and chopped vegetables (celery, onions, carrots, turnips) to the stock.

  3. Simmer for 1.5 to 2 hours until the peas are tender.

  4. While the soup simmers, boil the rabbit in hot water until cooked through, about 30-40 minutes.

Serve

  1. Serve the rabbit with the soup.

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 + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Celery + turniptop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,418 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Celery + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together16,012 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Split peas
Break down during simmering to thicken the soup and give it body.
Rabbit
Provides the main protein and meat for the dish, served alongside the soup.
Onions
Soften and sweeten as they simmer, adding depth to the stock.

The step that matters

Simmer the soup until the peas are tender. Split peas need sustained gentle simmering to soften fully and thicken the broth. Stopping early leaves them firm and gritty, while a hard boil can break the stock cloudy.

Swap the peas

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

  1. Beansfits better
  2. Lentilsfits better
  3. Chestnutfits better
  4. Peasthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against rabbit, celery, onion, carrot, turnip, 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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