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Force-meat Balls for Ragouts, &C.

Force-meat balls are meatballs made from veal, beef suet, herbs, and breadcrumbs, boiled or fried before adding to ragouts.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 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 ↓

Force-meat Balls for Ragouts, &C.

Oven, in the book's wordsA cool oven

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Pound the veal and beef suet in a marble mortar with sweet herbs, parsley, shallots, bread crumbs, pepper, salt, and nutmeg.

  2. Form the mixture into balls using the raw egg yolk.

  3. Boil or fry the balls lightly before adding them to any dish.

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

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

  4. Shallot + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,019 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

Veal
Provides the lean meat base that gives the meatballs their main body.
Beef suet
Adds fat that keeps the meatballs moist and tender as they cook.
Bread crumbs
Absorb moisture and help the mixture hold together with a softer texture.
Raw egg yolk
Binds the mixture so it can be formed into balls and holds its shape.

The step that matters

Boil or fry the balls lightly before adding them to any dish. Cooking the raw meat mixture sets the proteins and firms the balls so they hold their shape in the dish. Skipping this pre-cook can leave the centre undercooked or the balls falling apart in a sauce.

Swap the shallot

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against veal, beef, parsley, bread, pepper, nutmeg, 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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