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Babbit with Caper Sauce

A roasted rabbit served with a caper-infused sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Capers and flour match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,024 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Babbit with Caper Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the rabbit

  1. Soak the cleaned rabbit in saltwater for 1 hour.

  2. Pour vinegar over the rabbit and let it pickle overnight.

  3. Roast the rabbit and strain the gravy.

Make the sauce

  1. In a deep stew pan, melt the butter and sauté the onion, bay leaf, peppercorns, and celery root.

  2. Add the rabbit to the pan and pour in some of the pickling vinegar.

  3. Lightly salt each piece of rabbit before stewing.

  4. Add ½ cup capers and 1 teaspoon flour to the gravy for thickening.

  5. Cook until tender, then thicken with browned flour mixed with butter.

  6. Taste and adjust seasoning with white pepper and a pinch of mace if needed.

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. Capers + flourtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,024 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Capers + celerytop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together405 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Onion + celerytop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,518 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  4. Capers + oniontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,381 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter 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
Provides the main meat, which becomes tender through long stewing in liquid.
Capers
Add a sharp, briny acidity that cuts through the rich gravy.
Flour
Thickens the gravy so the sauce clings to the rabbit.
Butter
Adds richness and helps build flavour when melted and used to brown the flour.
Vinegar
Acidity from pickling softens the meat and adds tang to the sauce.

The step that matters

Cooking the rabbit until tender. Rabbit is lean and dries out or toughens if cooked too hard or too fast. Slow, gentle simmering in liquid breaks down connective tissue and keeps the meat moist.

Swap the celery

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (rabbit, capers, flour, egg, butter, onion, vinegar):

  1. Tarragonfits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Garlicfits better
  4. Celerythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against rabbit, capers, flour, egg, butter, onion, vinegar. 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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