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Meat Rissoles

A fried patty of finely chopped cold meat bound with butter, herbs, egg yolk, and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Meat Rissoles

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the filling

  1. Exclude all fat, skin, and outside from the cold meat and chop it finely.

  2. Pound the meat with butter, pepper, salt, and herbs in a mortar.

  3. Moisten the mixture with stock and heat in a pan until hot.

  4. Stir in the beaten egg yolk and lemon juice.

  5. Let the mixture cool.

Make and fill the pastry

  1. Make a paste with flour, butter, salt, egg yolks, and water.

  2. Roll the paste out and cut into small squares.

  3. Place meat mixture in the center of each square, fold corners over, and press down.

Fry and serve

  1. Fry the filled squares in hot lard until golden brown.

  2. Serve.

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

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

  2. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  5. Meat + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,594 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Cold meat
Forms the savoury filling that gives the rissoles their main flavour and body.
Flour
Forms the paste structure that encloses the filling and crisps when fried.
Butter
Adds richness and fat to both the filling and the pastry, improving texture.
Egg yolks
Add richness and help bind the pastry dough and the filling.

The step that matters

Let the mixture cool before filling the pastry. A hot filling softens the raw paste, making it tear or leak, and can melt the butter before frying. Cooling firms the filling so it stays sealed in the squares.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Lemonthe original
  2. Raisinfits about as well
  3. Avocadofits less well
  4. Figfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against meat, butter, pepper, 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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