Skip to main content
Main

Babbit, Baked

Baked rabbit pieces covered with bacon, served with a brown roux gravy and mashed potatoes.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Rabbit and milk work together. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 284 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Babbit, Baked

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Soak the rabbit in milk and water for 1-2 hours.

  2. Drain and cut the rabbit into small serving pieces.

  3. Lightly season the pieces with salt and pepper.

Bake

  1. Place the rabbit in a single layer in a baking dish and cover each piece with bacon.

  2. Bake in a 350°F (175°C) oven until cooked through.

Serve

  1. Arrange the rabbit and bacon alternately on a serving dish.

  2. Skim off excess grease from the baking tin and thicken the gravy with brown roux before pouring it over the rabbit.

  3. Serve hot with mashed potatoes.

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. Rabbit + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together284 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  2. Rabbit + peppertop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,334 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-pentylpyridine (fat).

  3. Milk + peppertop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together26,984 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl 2-methylbutyrate (fruity, apple).

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

What each ingredient does

Rabbit
Provides the lean meat that is the main substance of the dish.
Bacon
Covers the meat and renders fat that bastes it and adds savory flavor as it bakes.
Milk
Softens the rabbit meat during the initial soak and mellows its gamey flavor.
Brown roux
Thickens the pan juices into a gravy that coats the rabbit.

The step that matters

Bake until cooked through. Rabbit is very lean and dries out quickly, so it should be checked for doneness rather than simply timed, while the bacon protects the surface.

“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