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Beef Rissoles

Beef rissoles are minced beef balls coated in breadcrumbs and fried, served with parsley and brown gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 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 ↓

Beef Rissoles

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Mince the cold roast beef very fine.

  2. Add pepper, coarse sea salt, chopped herbs, and minced lemon peel.

  3. Mix in the bread crumbs, using half the weight of the beef.

  4. Bind the mixture with the eggs to form a thick paste.

  5. Form the mixture into balls.

Coat and fry

  1. Dip the balls in the white of egg and coat with bread crumbs.

  2. Fry the rissoles until they are a rich brown.

Serve

  1. Serve with fried parsley and brown gravy.

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. Beef + peppertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,971 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Cold roast beef
Forms the main body of the rissoles and gives them their meaty flavor.
Bread crumbs
Absorb moisture and give the mixture body so the rissoles hold their shape.
Eggs
Bind the mixture into a thick paste that holds together when formed.
Egg white
Gives the outer bread crumb coating a sticky base to adhere to.

The step that matters

Fry the rissoles until they are a rich brown. Browning from frying creates flavorful Maillard reactions on the crumb surface. Frying too gently leaves them pale and soft, while the coating can burn if the heat is too high 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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