Name: Meat Balls for Soups
Ingredients: fresh cooked meat or fowl; pepper; coarse sea salt; herbs; lemon; 1 egg; bread-crumbs; hot lard

Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Meat Balls for Soups

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

Chop the fresh cooked meat or fowl finely.
Season with pepper, coarse sea salt, herbs, and a little lemon.
Mix the seasoned meat with 1 egg.

Coat and fry

Roll the mixture in bread-crumbs.
Fry the meatballs in hot lard 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.

Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together27,047 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).
Egg + breadtop 13% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together22,662 recipes

Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).
Meat + breadtop 14% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together2,924 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).
Pepper + breadtop 16% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together20,964 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).
Lemon + eggtop 19% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together44,316 recipes

Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

Lemon and egg barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 44,316 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Fresh cooked meat or fowl: Forms the main body of the meatballs, giving them flavour and substance.
Egg: Binds the chopped meat so the meatballs hold their shape.
Bread-crumbs: Coat the outside, helping the meatballs brown and form a crisp surface when fried.
Hot lard: Conducts heat for frying, browning the coating to a golden colour.

“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.