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Force Meat Balls for Soup

Meatballs made from finely chopped meat, herbs, lemon juice, and egg yolk, browned in butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Thyme and parsley 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 ↓

Force Meat Balls for Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the meatballs

  1. In a bowl, combine the chopped meat, salt, thyme, pepper, lemon juice, parsley, egg yolk, and onion juice. Mix well and form into balls the size of a nutmeg.

  2. Place the balls on a plate and sprinkle with flour.

Brown

  1. In a frying pan, melt the butter over medium heat. Add the meatballs and brown them on all sides.

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. Thyme + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Lemon + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

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

  3. Thyme + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,973 recipes

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

  4. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  5. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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

What each ingredient does

Chopped meat
Forms the main body of the meatballs and provides savory flavor and structure.
Egg yolk
Binds the meat mixture together so the balls hold their shape.
Flour
Dry coating on the outside that helps the meatballs brown.
Butter
Fat for the pan that carries heat and adds richness to the browning.

The step that matters

Browning the meatballs on all sides. Browning over medium heat develops flavor through the Maillard reaction. Turning them evenly keeps the surface seared and helps the balls hold their shape as they cook.

Swap the onion

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against meat, thyme, pepper, lemon, parsley, 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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