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Partridge Meat Balls

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and oyster are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,184 recipes. Both carry 2,6-nonadienal, which smells cucumber, green. The science ↓

Partridge Meat Balls

Ingredients

Directions

  1. In a bowl, combine the yolks of 2 hard-boiled eggs, chopped turtle meat, butter, and oyster liquor if available.

  2. Season the mixture with mace, cayenne pepper, and white sugar.

  3. Bind the mixture together with a raw egg.

  4. Roll the mixture into small balls.

  5. Dip each ball into beaten egg, then coat with rolled crackers.

  6. Fry the balls in butter until golden brown, then add them to the soup.

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. Butter + oystertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,184 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, green).

  2. Egg + oystertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,103 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  3. Mace + peppertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,257 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

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

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Meat + oystertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together536 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

Mace and pepper barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 12,257 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

Swap the mace

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

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Cinnamonfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, meat, butter, oyster, pepper, sugar. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

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