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Meat Balls, with Walnut Sauce

Meatballs made with ground meat, onions, parsley, spices, bread crumbs, eggs, and flour, served in a walnut vinegar sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 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

Make the meatballs

  1. In a bowl, mix the ground meat, onion, parsley, allspice, thyme, bread crumbs, beaten eggs, and flour until combined.

  2. Form the mixture into balls and fry them until golden brown.

Simmer and serve

  1. In a pan, heat the diluted vinegar until boiling, then add the fried meatballs.

  2. Let the meatballs simmer in the vinegar for about 15 minutes.

  3. Serve 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

Ground meat
Forms the main body of the meatballs and provides savory flavor and richness.
Eggs
Bind the mixture together and help hold the meatballs in shape.
Bread crumbs
Absorb moisture and keep the meatballs tender rather than dense.
Flour
Helps bind the mixture and aids browning on the frying surface.
Onion
Adds moisture and savory sweetness as it softens within the meat.
Diluted vinegar
Adds acidity that gives the simmered meatballs a sharp, tangy flavor.

The step that matters

Frying the meatballs until golden brown. Browning the outside creates flavor through the Maillard reaction and helps the balls hold their shape before simmering in the vinegar.

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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