Why it works: Egg and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 118,967 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓
Quenelles
Ingredients
Directions
Shape
Mould forcemeat into balls.
Dip each ball into beaten egg white.
For elegant quenelles, line a spoon with forcemeat and trim with a knife.
Use a second spoon dipped in hot water to remove quenelle from the first spoon.
Place quenelles on buttered paper.
Cook
Fry in butter until golden.
Poach for 2-3 minutes before adding to soup.
If serving as an entree, boil for 10 minutes or fry in butter.
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.
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Egg + buttertop 17% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together118,967 recipes
Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).
Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs
What each ingredient does
- Forcemeat
- Forms the main body of the quenelle and sets into a tender, delicate texture when cooked.
- Egg white
- Forms a thin coating that helps the shaped forcemeat hold its shape and brown when fried.
- Butter
- Adds fat for browning and flavour when the quenelles are fried.
The step that matters
Dipping in egg white and shaping. Forcemeat is soft and wet, so a thin egg white coating helps it hold its shape. Dipping the spoon in hot water releases the quenelle cleanly without tearing it.
“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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