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Receipt for Force-meat Balls

A dish of finely minced meat mixed with herbs, lemon, and egg, formed into balls and fried or boiled.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and thyme 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 ↓

Receipt for Force-meat Balls

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Chop the meat or chicken very fine.

  2. Season with pepper, salt, parsley, thyme, lemon juice, and grated lemon peel.

  3. Break in the raw egg and sprinkle with flour.

  4. Roll the mixture into balls the size of a pigeon's egg.

  5. Fry or sauté the balls in a little butter, or cook them in boiling water.

  6. Alternatively, egg and breadcrumb the balls, then fry in boiling lard.

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. Parsley + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Parsley + lemontop 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

Raw egg
Binds the chopped meat so the balls hold their shape during cooking.
Flour
Dusted over the mixture to help absorb moisture and make the balls easier to handle.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour of the meat.
Grated lemon peel
Adds aromatic lemon oils that scent the meatballs.
Butter
Fat for frying that promotes browning on the outside of the balls.

Swap the thyme

The recipe marks thyme as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (meat, pepper, parsley, lemon, egg, flour, butter):

  1. Thymethe original
  2. Marjoramfits about as well
  3. Tarragonfits about as well
  4. Nutmegfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against meat, pepper, parsley, lemon, egg, flour, butter. 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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