Skip to main content
Main

Force Meat Balls for Turtle, Mock Turtle, or Made Dishes

Meatballs made from veal, udder, butter, bread crumbs, milk, shallot, parsley, egg yolks, and spices, used in turtle soup, mock turtle, or made dishes.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Shallot and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,737 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Force Meat Balls for Turtle, Mock Turtle, or Made Dishes

Ingredients

Directions

Make the meatball mixture

  1. Pound the veal in a mortar and rub it through a sieve with the same amount of udder.

  2. Add the butter and mix well.

  3. In a stew-pan, moisten the bread crumbs with milk, then add the shallot and parsley.

  4. Rub the mixture in a mortar until smooth, then sieve it.

  5. Once cold, pound and mix everything together with the hard-boiled egg yolks.

Season and shape

  1. Season with curry powder or cayenne pepper and salt, then add the raw egg yolks.

  2. Form small balls and add them to the soup a few minutes before serving.

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. Shallot + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,737 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  2. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

  3. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

  4. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  5. Bread + milktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Veal
Provides the main meaty body and firm, tender texture of the meatballs.
Udder
Adds a soft, gelatinous texture and rich body to the meat mixture.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, giving the mixture a smoother, more tender bite.
Bread crumbs
Absorb milk and help bind the mixture, keeping the meatballs moist and tender.
Raw egg yolks
Bind the mixture together and add richness to hold the balls in shape.

The step that matters

Let the mixture cool before mixing in the egg yolks. Cooling the pounded mixture keeps the fat firm and stops the raw egg yolks from starting to set or separate in the warm paste, so the balls hold together.

Swap the shallot

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

  1. Capsicumfits about as well
  2. Potatofits about as well
  3. Carrotfits about as well
  4. Shallotthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against veal, butter, bread, milk, parsley, egg, pepper. 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.

You might also like

Brown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesWhite BreadWhite Bread80 recipesBread OmeletteBread Omelette60 recipesOatmeal BreadOatmeal Bread51 recipes