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Forcemeat Balls, for Turtle, Mock Turtle, and Made-dishes

A forcemeat mixture of veal, butter, breadcrumbs, milk, parsley, shallot, egg yolks, and spices formed into balls for soup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and shallot match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,737 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Forcemeat Balls, for Turtle, Mock Turtle, and Made-dishes

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the veal

  1. Pound the veal in a mortar and rub it through a sieve.

  2. Mix in the udder or butter.

Make the paste

  1. Soak the bread crumbs in milk and add to a stewpan.

  2. Add chopped parsley and shallot, then rub together until a paste forms.

  3. Pass the mixture through a sieve and let it cool.

  4. Pound and mix everything with the hard-boiled egg yolks.

  5. Season with salt, pepper, and curry powder or cayenne.

  6. Add the raw egg yolks and mix well.

Form and serve

  1. Form the mixture into balls.

  2. Add the balls to your soup about ten minutes before serving.

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 + shallottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,737 recipes

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

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

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

  3. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  4. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  5. Bread + milktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Veal
Provides the main body of the forcemeat, giving it a firm, meaty structure once pounded.
Bread crumbs
Soaked in milk, they add moisture and softness that keeps the forcemeat tender.
Raw egg yolks
Bind the mixture together and help it hold its shape when formed into balls.
Hard-boiled egg yolks
Add richness and a fine, crumbly texture that smooths the paste.
Udder or butter
Adds fat, which gives the forcemeat richness and a softer, more tender texture.

The step that matters

Cooling the mixture before adding the raw egg yolks. If the paste is still warm when the raw yolks go in, they can begin to cook or curdle unevenly, and the mixture becomes harder to shape smoothly into balls. Letting it cool first keeps the texture even and the balls firm.

Swap the shallot

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

  1. Capsicumfits about as well
  2. Potatofits about as well
  3. Carrotfits about as well
  4. Shallotthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against veal, butter, bread, milk, parsley, egg, pepper. 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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