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Meat Balls for Corner Dish

Meatballs made with minced pork, minced beef or sausage meat, egg yolks, sweet herbs, coated in egg and bread crumbs, fried.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Pork and beef match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,690 recipes. Both carry 12-methyltridecanal, which smells tallowy, beefy. The science ↓

Meat Balls for Corner Dish

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Mix the minced pork, minced beef or sausage meat, and sweet herbs in a bowl. Add the egg yolks and mix until well combined.

  2. Shape the mixture into balls the size of an egg.

Coat and fry

  1. Coat each ball in egg and then in bread crumbs.

  2. Fry the balls in hot oil until they are a nice light brown.

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. Pork + beeftop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,690 recipes

    Shared aroma: 12-methyltridecanal (tallowy, beefy).

  2. Beef + breadtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,032 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (popcorn, roasted).

  3. Pork + breadtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,371 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (popcorn, roasted).

  4. Egg + breadtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

  5. Pork + eggtop 30% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,387 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

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

What each ingredient does

Minced pork
Provides fat and savoury flavour, keeping the meatballs moist as they cook.
Minced beef or sausage meat
Adds meaty body and flavour, giving the meatballs structure when shaped.
Egg yolks
Bind the meat together and add richness and moisture to the mixture.
Bread crumbs
Form a crisp coating that browns when the meatballs are fried.

The step that matters

Fry in hot oil until light brown. If the oil is not hot enough, the coating absorbs oil and turns greasy before it browns. Oil that is too hot browns the outside before the centre cooks through.

“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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