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Jugged Rabbit

A rabbit stew simmered with onions, spices, and a sauce of butter, flour, and mushroom ketchup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and allspice match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,874 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Jugged Rabbit

Ingredients

Directions

Brown the rabbit

  1. Brown the rabbit pieces in hot butter in a frying pan.

  2. Transfer the browned rabbit to a stew pan.

Make the sauce

  1. In the frying pan, add remaining flour and stir until smooth.

  2. Add water to the flour mixture and cook for 10 minutes.

  3. Pour the liquid over the rabbit in the stew pan.

Stew and serve

  1. Add bay leaves, cloves, allspice, salt, pepper, and the uncut onion.

  2. Cover and simmer for 1.5 hours.

  3. Stir in the sherry, lemon juice, and mushroom ketchup.

  4. Serve the rabbit on a warm platter with the sauce strained over it.

  5. Accompany with boiled rice.

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. Clove + allspicetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

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

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

  3. Clove + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  4. Allspice + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,395 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  5. Allspice + lemontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,083 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

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

What each ingredient does

Rabbit
Provides the main meat, which becomes tender through long, slow simmering.
Butter
Browns the rabbit pieces and adds richness to the dish.
Flour
Thickens the cooking liquid into a smooth sauce.
Sherry
Adds acidity and a deeper, mellow flavour to the sauce.

The step that matters

Stirring the flour into the butter until smooth. Flour added to hot fat must be stirred well and cooked briefly so it dissolves evenly; adding water then gives a smooth, lump-free sauce instead of clumps.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Capsicumfits better
  3. Carrotfits better
  4. Onionthe original

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