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Boiled Rabbit and Onion Sauce

A soup of boiled rabbit with onion sauce, split peas, celery, carrots, and turnips.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 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. Boil the rabbit in hot water to clean it.

  4. Skin and wash the rabbit well.

Simmer the soup

  1. In a pot, combine the stock, soaked peas, chopped celery, onions, carrots, and turnips.

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

  3. If not soaking overnight, cook the peas and rabbit together for 3 to 4 hours instead.

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

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

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 meat flavour and richness to the broth.
Onions
Add sweetness and aroma as they soften in the stock.

The step that matters

Simmering until the peas are tender. Split peas need sustained gentle simmering to soften fully and thicken the broth. If they are undercooked, the soup stays grainy and thin. Dried peas soaked overnight cook faster than unsoaked ones, so the timing changes with preparation.

Swap the peas

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

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

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