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Potato Balls

Potato balls filled with seasoned meat, baked with butter, served hot with buttered peas or cauliflower au gratin.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Potato Balls

Why it works: Butter and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Potato Balls

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the potato

  1. Melt a lump of butter in a saucepan, then add the mashed potatoes and stir well.

  2. Season, then add a little hot milk to the mixture.

  3. Roll the mixture into balls.

Fill and bake

  1. Make a hollow in the top of each ball with a teaspoon.

  2. Fill each hollow with seasoned meat.

  3. Place the balls in a buttered tin and add a pat of butter on top of each ball.

  4. Brown the balls in the oven.

Serve

  1. Serve hot on a round dish with buttered peas or cauliflower au gratin in the center.

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. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Potato + peastop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,016 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

  3. Potato + milktop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,611 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,z)-2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, melon).

  4. Potato + buttertop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,456 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  5. Potato + meattop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together786 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

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

What each ingredient does

Mashed potatoes
Form the soft outer shell that holds the filling and browns in the oven.
Chopped cooked meat
Provides the savory filling that sits inside each potato ball.
Butter
Adds richness and helps the outside brown as the balls bake.
Hot milk
Loosens the potato mixture so it is soft enough to shape into balls.

The step that matters

Rolling and hollowing the balls. The potato mixture must be firm enough to hold its shape, yet soft enough to shape without cracking. If the hollow is too thin, the filling can leak out during baking.

Swap the peas

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (potato, meat, butter, milk):

  1. Peanutfits better
  2. Cocoafits about as well
  3. Almondfits about as well
  4. Peasthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against potato, meat, butter, milk. 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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