RABBIT STEW

No other bowl of food in this game asks for as many separate things at once. Rabbit stew wants 1 baked potato, 1 cooked rabbit, 1 bowl, 1 carrot, 1 brown mushroom, which means a farm, a rabbit hunt, a mushroom patch and a crafted bowl all have to line up before you can even start cooking. Buying it from a Butcher skips every one of those steps at once.

A Butcher at novice sells 1 rabbit stew for 1 emerald, turning what would otherwise be an afternoon of gathering into a single trade.

One trader carries it. A Butcher reaching novice, level 1 of five, sells 1 rabbit stew for 1 emerald, a fixed rate rather than something rolled per villager.

Rabbit Stew sells for as little as 1 emerald, from the Butcher at the Novice tier, and nothing else on that list costs more. The price is fixed rather than rolled, so a second Butcher will quote you exactly the same.

The Butcher at its novice tier asks 1 emerald for rabbit stew. 8 of the 72 villagers that pay emeralds, emptied out:

a lava bucket against 24 flint for the same 1 emerald, 24 times the carrying, and the shortest wait is the Leatherworker at 37.5 real seconds of shelf, gathering not counted.

Rabbit stew unlocks at novice, which costs 0 banked trading experience earned selling whatever meat the Butcher offers below that tier, before the stew row appears on his table at all.

The slot handles 12 sales before it locks, and a restock brings the exact same offer back rather than swapping in a different cut of meat.

12 sales close the row, needing 2 real minutes idle before it restocks, well inside the 20-minute villager day.

Stand by for both refills and one butcher sells 24 rabbit stew for 24 emeralds a Minecraft day, no hunting or farming required on your end at all.

Take the full slot in one go: 12 rabbit stew for 12 emeralds before the offer locks and needs to refill.

Where the emeralds come from: the same Butcher pays an emerald per 4 raw rabbit, meat you likely already have piling up from hunting for the stew's own recipe.

Also on the Butcher's list: coal, cooked porkchop, cooked chicken, raw mutton, raw beef, and dried kelp block.

Rabbit stew takes a cooked rabbit, a baked potato, a carrot, a brown mushroom and a bowl, and gives back one bowl of stew. It restores more hunger than any other food in the game, and it does not stack, so the reward for all that work is a single inventory slot doing one meal.

The rabbit is the hard part. Rabbits are fast, fragile and thin on the ground, and cooking one is another step on top. Everything else in the recipe is something a farm already produces.

The bowl comes back when you eat it, which is the small mercy. Buying the stew made is buying somebody else's rabbit hunt.