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Roast Kabbit

A stuffed rabbit roasted with a savory meat mixture, butter, lemon, onion, and served with currant jelly.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Rabbit and pork work together. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 832 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Roast Kabbit

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Clean, wash, and soak the rabbit in salted water for 1.5 hours, changing the water once.

  2. Have your butcher skin the rabbit for you.

  3. Parboil the heart and liver. Chop the heart and liver finely.

  4. Mix the chopped heart and liver with minced pork. Make a moist force-meat with bread crumbs and the giblet water. Mix the force-meat into the minced meat mixture.

Stuff and roast

  1. Stuff the rabbit with the mixture. Sew the rabbit closed.

  2. Rub the rabbit with butter.

  3. Roast the rabbit, basting with butter and water until the gravy flows freely. Baste the rabbit with dripping.

  4. Dredge the rabbit with flour a few minutes before removing it from the oven. Froth the rabbit with butter.

Make the sauce and serve

  1. Place the rabbit in a hot dish. Add lemon juice to the dish. Add minced onion to the dish. Add butter to the dish.

  2. Thicken the sauce with browned flour. Bring the sauce to a boil.

  3. Serve the rabbit in a tureen or boat. Garnish with sliced lemon. Dot each slice with currant jelly.

  4. Cut off the head 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. Rabbit + porktop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together832 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  2. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Liver + porktop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,606 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-nonanal (fatty, waxy).

  4. Pork + oniontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,214 recipes

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

  5. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour 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

Bread crumbs
Soak up giblet water to form a moist force-meat that keeps the stuffing tender.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, and browns the skin while basting.
Flour
Dredged on the rabbit and browned to thicken the sauce.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich sauce and meat.
Currant jelly
Adds sweetness and tartness that contrasts with the rich meat.
Heart and liver
Add rich, savoury depth to the stuffing mixture.

The step that matters

Roast the rabbit, basting with butter and water until the gravy flows freely. Rabbit is very lean, so it dries out quickly. Regular basting adds moisture and fat, keeping the meat juicy while the drippings form the gravy.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (rabbit, liver, pork, bread, butter, flour, onion):

  1. Applefits better
  2. Coconutfits about as well
  3. Avocadofits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against rabbit, liver, pork, bread, butter, flour, onion. 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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