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Forcemeat Balls for Turtle, Mock Turtle, or Made Dishes

A forcemeat mixture of veal, butter, breadcrumbs, milk, parsley, shallot, egg yolks, and spices formed into small balls for turtle soup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 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 ↓

Forcemeat Balls for Turtle, Mock Turtle, or Made Dishes

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the forcemeat

  1. Pound the veal in a mortar and mix with the udder or butter.

  2. In a stew-pan, moisten the bread crumbs with milk and add parsley and shallot.

  3. Rub the mixture in a mortar until smooth, then pass through a sieve.

  4. When cold, pound the mixture with the hard-boiled egg yolks.

  5. Season with salt, pepper, and curry powder, then add the raw egg yolks. Mix well and form into small balls.

Serve

  1. Add the balls to your soup ten minutes before serving.

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. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

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

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

  5. Bread + milktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Veal
Provides the main meaty body and firm structure of the forcemeat balls.
Bread crumbs
Absorb milk and help bind the mixture so it holds its shape.
Raw egg yolks
Bind the mixture and enrich it, helping the balls set when cooked in soup.
Hard-boiled egg yolks
Add richness and a crumbly, tender texture to the forcemeat.
Udder or butter
Adds fat, which gives the forcemeat moisture and a tender texture.

The step that matters

Rub the mixture until smooth. If the mixture is not worked fine and smooth, lumps of meat and crumb will stay coarse and the balls will crumble or feel gritty. Passing it through a sieve removes remaining fibres for a uniform, tender texture.

Swap the shallot

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

  1. Capsicumfits about as well
  2. Potatofits about as well
  3. Carrotfits about as well
  4. Shallotthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against veal, butter, bread, milk, parsley, egg, 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.

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