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Rabbits Stewed with Onions

A stew of rabbits simmered with onions, butter, lemon juice, and pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Rabbits Stewed with Onions

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the rabbits

  1. Clean the rabbits and soak them in cold water with salt for 1 hour.

  2. Place the rabbits in a large saucepan and cover with cold water, adding a little salt.

  3. Stew the rabbits until tender.

Make the onion sauce

  1. Slice the onions and boil them in a small amount of water until fully cooked.

  2. Drain the onions and stir them into the drawn butter, adding pepper to taste.

  3. When the mixture simmers, add the lemon juice.

Serve

  1. Remove the heads from the rabbits, place them in a hot dish, and pour the onion sauce over them.

  2. Cover the dish and let it stand in a warm place for 5 minutes before serving.

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 + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

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

  3. Rabbit + oniontop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,292 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  4. Rabbit + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together626 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Onion + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together42,912 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

What each ingredient does

Rabbits
Provide the meat, which becomes tender through slow stewing in liquid.
Onions
Cooked until soft, they thicken the sauce and add sweetness and body.
Drawn butter
Adds richness and fat, carrying flavour and giving the onion sauce a smooth texture.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich butter and onion sauce.

The step that matters

Add the lemon juice only once the sauce simmers. Acid added to a hot, rich butter sauce brightens it evenly, while adding it too early in a cold mixture can leave it sharp and uneven in flavour.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Asparagusfits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Spinachfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against rabbit, butter, pepper, lemon. 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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