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Chicken Liver Balls

A savory dish of ground chicken liver and heart formed into balls and simmered in soup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Chicken and onion are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 17,814 recipes. Both carry gamma-nonanolactone, which smells coconut, sweet. The science ↓

Chicken Liver Balls

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the mixture

  1. Cook the chicken liver and heart until very tender.

  2. Pass the cooked meat through a meat grinder until it becomes a fine paste.

  3. Mix in the onion juice, salt, bread crumbs, and white pepper.

  4. Add enough raw egg white to achieve a consistency suitable for shaping into balls.

Shape and cook

  1. Form about 12 balls and drop them into hot soup.

  2. Simmer until the balls rise to the top, then serve immediately, allowing two or more balls as a garnish per plate.

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. Chicken + oniontop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,814 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-nonanolactone (coconut, sweet).

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

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

  3. Chicken + breadtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,258 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl caproate (fruity).

  4. Liver + oniontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,420 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  5. Onion + breadtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,676 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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

What each ingredient does

Chicken liver
Provides the main body and rich flavour of the balls.
Chicken heart
Adds more meat to bind the paste and deepen the savoury flavour.
Stale bread crumbs
Absorb moisture and help the paste hold its shape.
Raw egg whites
Bind the paste so the balls hold together when shaped and simmered.

The step that matters

Adding the raw egg white. Too little white leaves the paste too crumbly to shape, while too much makes it loose and sticky. Add it gradually until the mixture is firm enough to roll.

Swap the white pepper

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (chicken, liver, onion, bread, egg):

  1. Garlicfits better
  2. Capersfits better
  3. Thymefits better
  4. White pepperthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, liver, onion, bread, 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.

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