Name: Forcemeat Balls
Ingredients: 1 ¾ cups soft bread crumbs; ½ teaspoon salt; ¼ teaspoon cayenne pepper; 1 tablespoon thyme; 1 tablespoon lemon juice; 1 tablespoon chopped parsley; ½ tablespoon grated onion; 1 egg yolk

Why it works: Thyme and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,057 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Forcemeat Balls

Ingredients

Directions

Mix all ingredients together.
Form the mixture into balls the size of a small marble.
Roll the balls in flour and brown them in hot fat.
Place 3 or 4 balls in each 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.

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.

Thyme + parsleytop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together9,057 recipes

Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).
Lemon + parsleytop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together14,037 recipes

Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).
Thyme + lemontop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together3,973 recipes

Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).
Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together34,122 recipes

Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).
Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

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

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (bread, pepper, thyme, lemon, parsley, egg):

Shallotfits better
Carrotfits better
Spinachfits better
Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, pepper, thyme, lemon, parsley, egg. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.