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Beef Bissoles

Beef Bissoles are meatballs made from minced roast beef, bread crumbs, herbs, lemon peel, and eggs, fried and served with gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,037 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Beef Bissoles

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the mixture

  1. Mince the beef very fine, ensuring it is rather lean.

  2. Mix the minced beef with bread crumbs, herbs, seasoning, and lemon peel.

  3. Combine all ingredients into a thick paste using 1 or 2 eggs.

Shape and fry

  1. Divide the mixture into balls or cones.

  2. Fry the balls or cones until they are a rich brown.

Serve

  1. Garnish with fried parsley and serve with brown gravy.

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. Lemon + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

  3. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  4. Beef + peppertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,971 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  5. Beef + breadtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,032 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (popcorn, roasted).

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

What each ingredient does

Cold roast beef
Provides the main body and savory flavor of the bissoles.
Bread crumbs
Absorb moisture and bind the minced beef so it holds its shape.
Eggs
Bind the mixture into a thick paste that holds together when shaped.
Lemon peel
Adds bright aromatic flavor that balances the rich beef.

The step that matters

Combining into a thick paste. If the mixture is too wet or too dry, the balls or cones may crumble or fall apart in the pan. Using 1 or 2 eggs and enough bread crumbs gives a paste firm enough to shape and hold during frying.

“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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