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Belgian Hare or Jack Rabbits

A rabbit stew cooked with ham or pickled pork, bacon, garlic, peppercorns, and flour, simmered in hot water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Rabbit and garlic work together. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 219 recipes. Both carry geraniol, which smells rose, geranium. The science ↓

Belgian Hare or Jack Rabbits

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 300°F (150°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the rabbit

  1. Roll the rabbit pieces in flour.

  2. In a large kettle, fry the ham or pickled pork with the lard.

  3. Brown the rabbit pieces one at a time in the kettle.

Braise

  1. Transfer the browned rabbit to a casserole dish lined with bacon.

  2. Add the garlic shreds and peppercorns, then sprinkle with flour.

  3. Pour in the hot water, cover, and place the casserole in the oven at 300°F (150°C) for nearly three hours.

  4. If no casserole is available, return the meat to the kettle, cover tightly, and simmer for four hours.

Finish and serve

  1. Before serving, add more hot water and thicken with flour.

  2. Optionally, add sherry for flavor.

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. Rabbit + garlictop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together219 recipes

    Shared aroma: geraniol (rose, geranium).

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

    Shared aroma: acetaldehyde (pungent, ethereal).

  3. Rabbit + hamtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together273 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  4. Ham + sherrytop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together377 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-ethyl-2-methoxyphenol (smoky, clove).

  5. Flour + garlictop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,149 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Rabbit
Is the main meat, becoming tender during long, slow cooking.
Flour
Coats the rabbit to help it brown, then thickens the cooking liquid into a sauce.
Ham or pickled pork
Renders fat and salty, savory flavor into the pan for the stew.
Lard
Conducts heat for browning the rabbit and adds richness.
Breakfast bacon
Lines the casserole, adding smoky, savory fat to the braising liquid.

The step that matters

Browning the rabbit pieces. Browning in batches over sufficient heat creates Maillard flavors on the floured surface. Crowding the pan steams the meat instead, leaving the stew pale and flat-tasting.

Swap the garlic

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (rabbit, flour, ham, sherry):

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Nutmegfits better
  3. Capersfits better
  4. Garlicthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against rabbit, flour, ham, sherry. 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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