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Forcemeat Balls

Forcemeat balls are small meat mixtures of veal, chicken, ham, spices, lemon, onion, egg yolk, and breadcrumbs, fried or poached.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Forcemeat Balls

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 ↓

Forcemeat Balls

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. In a bowl, combine the minced veal, chicken, ham, pepper, salt, lemon juice, lemon peel, and fried onion.

  2. Mix in the beaten egg yolk and bread crumbs until well combined.

  3. Roll the mixture into small balls.

Cook and serve

  1. Fry the balls in butter for 8 to 10 minutes or poach them in boiling water for 5 minutes.

  2. Serve small balls in soup or larger ones as an entrée.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Chicken + oniontop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,814 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-nonanolactone (coconut, sweet).

  3. Pepper + oniontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

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

  4. Veal + chickentop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,243 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-butanedione (buttery, creamy).

  5. Chicken + hamtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,497 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

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

What each ingredient does

Veal
Provides the tender, mild body of the meatball.
Chicken
Adds lean meat texture that softens the blend when combined with the other meats.
Ham
Adds savory, salty flavor to the mixture of minced meats.
Egg yolk
Binds the minced meat together so the balls hold their shape during cooking.
Bread crumbs
Absorb moisture and help keep the meatballs tender and cohesive.

The step that matters

Rolling and cooking the balls evenly. Balls of uneven size cook unevenly, so some centres can stay underdone while outer layers overcook. Rolling them to a similar small size helps the timing work for every ball.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (veal, chicken, ham, pepper, lemon, butter, egg):

  1. Asparagusfits better
  2. Capsicumfits better
  3. Leekfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against veal, chicken, ham, pepper, lemon, butter, egg. 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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