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Potato Rissoles

A fried ball made from mashed potatoes, chopped cold meat, and eggs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Potato and meat work together. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 786 recipes. Both carry 1-octen-3-one, which smells mushroom, metallic. The science ↓

Potato Rissoles

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. In a bowl, combine mashed potatoes, finely chopped cold meat, and chopped hard-boiled egg.

  2. Mix in the beaten egg until well combined.

Form and cook

  1. Form the mixture into balls.

  2. Fry the balls in a pan or dip them in egg yolk and brown them over a fire.

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. Potato + meattop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together786 recipes

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

  2. Meat + eggtop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,432 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  3. Potato + eggtop 29% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,978 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Mashed potatoes
Forms the bulk of the mixture and gives the rissoles a soft, moist body.
Cold meat
Adds savoury flavour and substance to the filling.
Hard-boiled egg
Adds richness and body to the filling.
Beaten egg
Binds the mixture so the balls hold their shape when cooked.

The step that matters

Mix in the beaten egg until well combined. The beaten egg is the binder. If it is unevenly mixed, the balls may crumble or fall apart when formed and fried.

Swap the potato

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

  1. Asparagusfits better
  2. Shallotfits about as well
  3. Mustardfits about as well
  4. Potatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against meat, 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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