Skip to main content
Main

French Ste-wed Rabbit

A rabbit stew cooked slowly with butter, flour, claret wine, mace, allspice, salt, and pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Pepper and allspice match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,395 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

French Ste-wed Rabbit

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash the rabbit pieces and place them in a stew-pan.

  2. Season with salt, pepper, mace, and allspice.

  3. Add enough water to keep the rabbit from sticking to the pan and cover it tightly.

Stew and serve

  1. Let it stew very slowly.

  2. When the rabbit is about half done, add the butter rolled in flour and the claret wine.

  3. Adjust seasoning with more salt, pepper, or spice if needed.

  4. Serve hot.

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. Pepper + allspicetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,395 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Mace + allspicetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  3. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Allspice + flourtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,302 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: acetaldehyde (pungent, ethereal).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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
Is the main protein, becoming tender as it stews slowly in liquid.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, giving the sauce a smooth, rounded mouthfeel.
Flour
Rolled into the butter, it thickens the cooking liquid into a sauce.
Claret wine
Adds acidity and depth of flavour to the stewing liquid.

The step that matters

Adding the butter rolled in flour. Adding the flour-coated butter when the rabbit is only half done gives it time to melt and blend into the liquid. Added too early or dumped in lumps, the flour can clump and the sauce can turn out uneven.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (rabbit, pepper, allspice, butter, flour, wine):

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Nutmegfits better
  3. Cinnamonfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against rabbit, pepper, allspice, butter, flour, wine. 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.

You might also like

Rabbit PattiesRabbit Patties6 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipes