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Forcemeat Balls for Soup Maigre

Forcemeat balls made from crawfish or shrimp, anchovy, egg, breadcrumbs, spices, and fried until golden.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and clove match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 17,451 recipes. Both carry ethyl octanoate, which smells fruity, wine. The science ↓

Forcemeat Balls for Soup Maigre

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the dough

  1. Pound the crawfish or shrimps in a mortar with the anchovy, hard-boiled egg yolk, bread crumbs, mace, cayenne, salt, and garlic.

  2. Work the mixture into a paste with the raw egg to form a dough.

Shape and fry

  1. Roll out the dough and cut it into small balls, about the size of marbles.

  2. Fry the balls in hot oil until they are 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 + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  2. Mace + clovetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,400 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  3. Pepper + garlictop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,090 recipes

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

  4. Clove + garlictop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,368 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

  5. Shrimp + garlictop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,743 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-ethyl-2,5-dimethylpyrazine (roasted, nutty).

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

What each ingredient does

Raw egg
Binds the mixture into a cohesive dough that holds its shape.
Stale bread crumbs
Absorb moisture and add body so the dough stays tender rather than dense.
Hard-boiled egg yolk
Adds richness and a soft, crumbly texture to the paste.
Crawfish or shrimp
Provides the main seafood flavour and protein that gives the balls their structure.
Garlic
Adds aromatic pungency that mellows during frying.

The step that matters

Fry in hot oil until golden brown. If the oil is not hot enough, the balls absorb oil and turn greasy before the surface browns. Oil that is hot enough sets the outside quickly and gives browning through the Maillard reaction, keeping the inside tender.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (shrimp, anchovy, egg, bread, pepper, clove, garlic):

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Capersfits better
  3. Thymefits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against shrimp, anchovy, egg, bread, pepper, clove, garlic. 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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