Skip to main content
Main

Potato Balls

Fried balls made from mashed potatoes, egg, breadcrumbs, and seasonings.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓
Potato Balls

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 Balls

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the balls

  1. Boil and mash the potatoes, adding pepper, salt, and parsley.

  2. Form the potato mixture into balls.

Coat and fry

  1. Dip the balls in egg and then in bread crumbs.

  2. Fry in hot lard or dripping until golden brown.

Serve

  1. Drain on paper towels and serve on a napkin.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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

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

  3. Potato + peppertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,305 recipes

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

  4. Egg + breadtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

  5. Bread + parsleytop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,588 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Potatoes
Mashed starch that holds the balls together and gives a soft, tender interior.
Egg
Binds the coating so the bread crumbs stick to the potato balls.
Bread crumbs
Forms a crisp, browned outer coating when fried.
Dripping or lard
Fat that fries the coating to golden brown and conducts heat evenly around the balls.

The step that matters

Fry in hot lard or dripping until golden brown. If the fat is not hot enough, the coating absorbs grease instead of crisping quickly, leaving the balls soggy and oily. Hot fat seals the breadcrumb crust and browns it evenly.

Swap the potato

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

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

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

More potato balls recipes

Fried 12Sweet 9English 7Baked 6Oyster 4Ragout 4 See all 126 →

You might also like

Brown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesPotato CroquettesPotato Croquettes255 recipesWhite BreadWhite Bread80 recipesPotato RollsPotato Rolls78 recipes