Why it works: Bread and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 20% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,445 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓
Good Common Forcemeat, for Roast Veal, Turkeys, &C.
Ingredients
Directions
Grate the stale bread into very fine crumbs.
Mix the lemon rind and savory herbs thoroughly with the bread crumbs, ensuring the mixture is smooth and well combined.
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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Bread + lemontop 20% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together8,445 recipes
Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).
Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs
What each ingredient does
- Stale bread
- Provides the bulk of the forcemeat and absorbs moisture to give it body.
- Lemon rind
- Adds bright, aromatic flavour from the oils in its zest.
- Mixed savory herbs
- Adds aromatic, savory flavour that carries through the crumbs.
The step that matters
Mixing the rind and herbs thoroughly. Finely minced rind and herbs must be evenly distributed through the crumbs. Uneven clumps make some bites intensely flavoured and others bland, and the aromatic oils release best when the pieces are small and spread out.
“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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