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To Dress Cold Beef, or Any Kind of Meat, Called Cecils

Cecils are meatballs made from cold cooked meat mixed with breadcrumbs, onion, anchovies, lemon peel, nutmeg, parsley, butter, egg, and breaded before frying.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,037 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

To Dress Cold Beef, or Any Kind of Meat, Called Cecils

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Mince the cooked meat, bread crumbs, onion, anchovies, lemon peel, nutmeg, and parsley.

  2. Melt the butter in a pan and mix the ingredients over low heat for a few minutes.

  3. Allow the mixture to cool, then form it into balls.

Coat and fry

  1. Dip each ball into beaten egg, then coat with bread crumbs.

  2. Fry the balls in hot oil until golden brown.

Serve

  1. 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. Lemon + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Nutmeg + parsleytop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,062 recipes

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

  3. Lemon + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  4. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  5. Onion + parsleytop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25,843 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

Cooked meat
Forms the main body of the balls and gives them their savory flavor.
Bread crumbs
Absorb moisture and help bind the mixture together.
Egg
Binds the coating so the crumbs stick to each ball.
Onion
Adds aromatic sweetness and depth as it softens in the butter.
Anchovies
Add savory depth that rounds out the flavor without tasting distinctly fishy.

The step that matters

Cooling the mixture before forming balls. A warm, soft mixture is hard to shape and may fall apart. Letting it cool lets the bread crumbs firm up and hold the balls together during frying.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Asparagusfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against meat, bread, lemon, nutmeg, parsley, butter, 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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