Skip to main content
Main

Meat Rissoles, German

A German dish of bacon, minced meat, stale bread, herbs, and spices formed into balls and simmered in stock.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Meat Rissoles, German

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the mixture

  1. Fry the bacon until golden brown.

  2. Stir in the chives and seasoning.

  3. Add the minced meat, then remove from heat.

  4. Soak the bread in broth, squeeze dry, and mix into the meat mixture.

  5. Let the mixture cool, then shape it into egg-sized balls.

Cook and serve

  1. Drop the rissoles into boiling stock or broth and cook for about 10 minutes.

  2. Serve with 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. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

  2. Chive + parsleytop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,150 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Chive + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,885 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

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

  5. Meat + breadtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,924 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

Minced meat
Provides the main body and savory flavor of the rissoles.
Stale bread
Soaked in broth, it absorbs liquid and keeps the mixture moist and tender.
Egg
Binds the mixture so the rissoles hold their shape during cooking.
Bacon
Adds fat and smoky, savory flavor to the mixture.

The step that matters

Squeeze the bread dry before mixing. Bread soaked in broth carries extra liquid. If it is not squeezed well, the mixture becomes too wet to bind and the rissoles may fall apart in the boiling stock.

Swap the chive

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, meat, 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.

You might also like

Brown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesWhite BreadWhite Bread80 recipesBread OmeletteBread Omelette60 recipesMeat CroquettesMeat Croquettes52 recipes