Skip to main content
Main

Veal Balls

Veal balls are meatballs made from cold veal, salt pork, bread crumbs, wine, eggs, and seasonings, then fried.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Pepper and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 13,015 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Veal Balls

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the meatballs

  1. Chop cold veal and salt pork.

  2. Mix with bread crumbs.

  3. Moisten with white wine and add eggs.

  4. Season with salt, pepper, nutmeg, and sweet herbs.

Shape and fry

  1. Form mixture into balls and dip in flour.

  2. Fry in butter until golden brown.

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 + nutmegtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

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

  2. Nutmeg + flourtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Veal + porktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,930 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-heptenal (creamy, biscuit).

  4. Pork + breadtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,371 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (popcorn, roasted).

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Veal
Forms the main body of the meatballs, giving them their meaty texture.
Salt pork
Adds fat, which keeps the meatballs moist and adds savoury flavour.
Bread crumbs
Absorb liquid and help the mixture hold together and stay tender.
Eggs
Bind the mixture so the meatballs keep their shape while cooking.
Flour
Dusting the shaped balls helps them brown evenly in the butter.
Butter
Fat for frying that promotes browning and adds rich flavour.

The step that matters

Fry in butter until golden brown. Butter browns at a fairly low temperature and can burn before the meatballs cook through. Keeping the heat moderate lets the surface brown while the centre cooks evenly.

Swap the nutmeg

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (veal, pork, bread, white wine, egg, pepper, flour):

  1. Marjoramfits about as well
  2. Parsleyfits about as well
  3. Sagefits about as well
  4. Nutmegthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against veal, pork, bread, white wine, egg, pepper, flour. 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.

You might also like

Brown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesPork CakePork Cake107 recipesRoast PorkRoast Pork82 recipesWhite BreadWhite Bread80 recipes