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Game Rissoles

Small pastry parcels filled with minced game, breadcrumbs, herbs, lemon zest, and eggs, then fried.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Game Rissoles

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the filling

  1. Finely mince the scraps of game.

  2. Mix the minced game with breadcrumbs, herbs, lemon zest, salt, and pepper.

  3. Bind the mixture with 1-2 eggs, depending on the quantity.

Shape the rissoles

  1. Roll out the pastry as thin as possible and cut it into rounds or squares.

  2. Place a spoonful of the game mixture in the center of each piece of pastry.

  3. Wet the edges and seal them tightly.

  4. Brush the tops with beaten egg.

Fry and serve

  1. Fry in hot lard until golden brown, about 5 minutes.

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 + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Lemon + eggtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together44,316 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

  3. Pepper + eggtop 33% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together50,580 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Lemon and egg barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 44,316 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Bind the minced game mixture so the filling holds together when cooked.
Breadcrumbs
Absorb moisture and soften the texture of the minced game filling.
Plain pastry
Encloses the filling and crisps to a golden, sealed casing when fried.
Lard
Fries the rissoles, conducting heat to brown and crisp the pastry.

The step that matters

Sealing the pastry edges. Wet edges must be pressed firmly closed, or the filling can leak out and fat can seep in during frying, leaving the rissoles greasy and loose.

“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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