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Bread Balls

Bread balls are fried bread fritters made with stale bread, eggs, butter, and seasonings.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and sage match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,388 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Bread Balls

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the mixture

  1. Break the stale bread into bits and add salt, pepper, butter, and sage if desired.

  2. Pour boiling water over the mixture to moisten the bread and stir until smooth.

  3. Beat the eggs until very light and add to the bread mixture.

Fry and serve

  1. Heat a skillet until smoking hot.

  2. Add the drippings or lard and butter to the skillet.

  3. Spoon the bread mixture into the skillet.

  4. Fry until rich brown on one side.

  5. Turn and fry the other side.

  6. Place on a hot platter and serve immediately.

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. Pepper + sagetop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,388 recipes

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

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

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

  3. Bread + eggtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

  4. Bread + sagetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,778 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  5. Bread + peppertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,964 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
Forms the body of the balls and absorbs the moisture and egg.
Eggs
Bind the bread mixture and set when fried, holding the balls together.
Drippings or lard and butter
Conduct heat in the skillet and brown the outside for flavour and colour.
Butter
Adds richness and flavour to the mixture.

The step that matters

Frying the bread mixture in a smoking hot skillet. Heating the fat until it smokes lets the outside sear and brown quickly, forming a crust that holds the ball together. A cool pan lets the mixture soak up fat and fall apart.

Swap the sage

The recipe marks sage as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (bread, pepper, egg, butter):

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Nutmegfits better
  3. Sagethe original
  4. Tarragonfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, pepper, egg, butter. 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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