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Meat Balls, with Walnut Sauce

Meatballs made with chopped meat, onion, parsley, spices, bread crumbs, eggs, and flour, served in a pickled walnut vinegar sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and thyme match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,057 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Meat Balls, with Walnut Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the meatballs

  1. Combine the chopped meat, onion, parsley, allspice, thyme, bread crumbs, beaten eggs, and flour in a bowl and mix the combined ingredients well.

  2. Form the mixture into balls.

  3. Fry the balls until golden brown.

Make the sauce and simmer

  1. Heat the diluted vinegar in a pan.

  2. Add the halved pickled walnuts to the heated vinegar and bring the mixture to a boil.

  3. Add the fried meatballs to the boiling vinegar.

  4. Simmer the meatballs in the sauce for about 15 minutes.

Serve

  1. Serve the meatballs hot, garnished with chopped hard boiled eggs and parsley.

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. Parsley + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Allspice + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,077 recipes

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

  3. Parsley + allspicetop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,289 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  4. Onion + thymetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,171 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Onion + parsleytop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25,843 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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

What each ingredient does

Meat
Provides the main body and savory richness of the meatballs.
Eggs
Bind the mixture together and help the meatballs hold their shape.
Bread crumbs
Absorb moisture and keep the meatballs tender rather than dense.
Flour
Helps bind the mixture and aids browning during frying.
Pickled walnuts
Add a tangy, briny flavor that infuses the vinegar sauce.
Diluted vinegar
Provides acidity that gives the sauce its sharp, tangy character.

The step that matters

Frying the balls until golden brown. The balls must be firm and well browned before simmering, because the eggs and flour set during frying and help the meatballs hold together in the acidic sauce instead of breaking apart.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (meat, parsley, allspice, thyme, bread, egg, flour):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Parsnipfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against meat, parsley, allspice, thyme, bread, egg, flour. 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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