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Meat Rolls

Meat rolls are thin fillets of meat stuffed with forcemeat, rolled, tied, coated with egg yolk and breadcrumbs, then cooked and served with gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,037 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Meat Rolls

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut thin fillets from any kind of meat that is not previously dressed.

  2. Place a small portion of forcemeat on each fillet and roll them up.

  3. Tie each roll with a piece of thread.

Cook

  1. Moisten the outside of the rolls with egg yolk and dust with bread crumbs.

  2. Season with pepper.

  3. Place the rolls on a spit and baste with butter.

  4. Cook for 10 minutes.

Serve

  1. Serve with gravy in the dish, garnished with sliced lemon, crispy parsley, or scraped horseradish.

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

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

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

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

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

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

  4. Parsley + horseradishtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together562 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Meat fillets
Form the main body of each roll, cooking to a tender, sliceable texture.
Forcemeat
Provides a rich, moist filling that keeps the rolls juicy as they cook.
Egg yolk
Acts as a glue so the bread crumbs adhere, and promotes golden browning.
Bread crumbs
Form a crisp, golden outer crust on the rolls.
Butter
Adds richness and helps brown the outside while basting.

The step that matters

Tie each roll with thread. Rolls that are not tied firmly can unroll during cooking, letting the filling escape and the shape fall apart.

Swap the horseradish

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

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Asparagusfits better
  3. Capsicumfits better
  4. Horseradishthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against meat, egg, bread, pepper, butter, lemon, parsley. 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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