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Force-meat Balls for Ragouts, Fyc.

Force-meat balls are made from lean veal, beef suet, herbs, and are 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, Fyc.

Oven, in the book's wordsA cool oven

Ingredients

Directions

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

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

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

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

Lean veal
Provides the main meaty body and firm texture of the balls.
Beef suet
Adds fat that keeps the balls moist and tender as they cook.
Bread crumbs
Absorbs moisture and softens the mixture so it holds together lightly.
Raw yolk of egg
Binds the pounded mixture so it can be formed into balls.

The step that matters

Boil or fry the balls lightly. Cooking the balls only lightly sets the protein and binding so they hold their shape. Overcooking toughens the veal and can make them dry and crumbly.

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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