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Potato Puff Balls

Potato puff balls are small, boiled balls made from mashed potatoes, bread crumbs, eggs, and seasonings.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 34,122 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Potato Puff Balls

Ingredients

Directions

Make the mixture

  1. Mix the crushed bread rusks with the mashed potatoes and beaten eggs.

  2. Add chopped parsley, pepper, salt, and nutmeg to the mixture.

  3. If the mixture is not stiff, add more bread rusks.

Shape and cook

  1. Form the mixture into small balls.

  2. Drop the balls into boiling salted water and cook for 15 minutes until they nearly double in size.

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 + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

  2. Parsley + nutmegtop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,062 recipes

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

  3. Potato + parsleytop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,855 recipes

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

  4. Pepper + nutmegtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

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

  5. Potato + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,052 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Mashed potatoes
Provide the bulk and soft, tender body of the puff balls.
Eggs
Bind the mixture together so the balls hold their shape while cooking.
Crushed bread rusks
Absorb moisture and add enough body to make the mixture firm enough to shape.

The step that matters

Adjusting the mixture's stiffness before shaping. If the mixture is too wet, the balls can fall apart in the boiling water. Adding more crushed rusks firms it so the balls hold together while cooking.

Swap the potato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (bread, egg, parsley, pepper, nutmeg):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Spinachfits better
  3. Carrotfits better
  4. Potatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, egg, parsley, pepper, nutmeg. 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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