Name: Forcemeat Balls
Ingredients: 1 cup fresh bread crumbs; ¼ teaspoon salt; ¼ teaspoon pepper; grated rind of 1 small lime; ½ teaspoon thyme or mixed herbs; 2 tablespoons chopped parsley; 1 beaten egg

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

Combine bread crumbs, salt, pepper, lime rind, thyme or mixed herbs, parsley, and beaten egg in a bowl, and mix well until combined.
Flour your hands and shape the mixture into small balls.
Boil, steam, or fry the balls according to your preference.

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).
Lime + thymetop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together305 recipes

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

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together3,491 recipes

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

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together547 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).

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

What each ingredient does

Bread crumbs: Absorb the beaten egg and bind the mixture into a soft, shapeable base.
Beaten egg: Binds the crumbs and herbs together so the balls hold their shape during cooking.
Lime rind: Adds bright aromatic citrus flavour that lifts the herbs.

Swap the lime

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

Lemonfits better
Limethe original
Red currantfits less well
Cherryfits less well

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