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Force-meat Balls

Fried meatballs made from chopped meat, herbs, lemon juice, and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Thyme and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,057 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Force-meat Balls

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the meatballs

  1. In a bowl, combine the chopped meat, salt, thyme, pepper, lemon juice, parsley, and onion juice.

  2. Beat the egg yolk and stir it into the meat mixture.

  3. Form the mixture into balls the size of nutmegs.

  4. Place the balls in a soup plate and sprinkle with flour, shaking the plate to coat them evenly.

Brown and cook

  1. In a frying pan, melt the butter over medium heat until browned.

  2. Drop the floured balls into the pan and shake occasionally until they are browned.

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. Thyme + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Lemon + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  3. Thyme + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,973 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  4. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Cooked meat
Forms the main body of the meatballs, giving them their substance and bite.
Egg yolk
Binds the meat mixture together so the balls hold their shape.
All-purpose flour
Coats the balls so they brown more evenly and develop a crisp surface in the pan.
Butter
Conducts heat in the pan and adds richness and browned flavor to the surface.

The step that matters

Coating the balls in flour before browning. A thin, even flour coat helps the surface brown and crisp instead of steaming. Uneven coating leaves bare spots that stick or brown unevenly.

“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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