Chop and mince 1 pound of round steak, 1 onion and 2 sprigs of parsley. Add 1 tablespoonful of lemon-juice, 2 tablespoonfuls of melted butter. Season highly with salt, black pepper and a pinch of cayenne. Mix with 1 egg and form into balls; roll in flour and fry in deep hot lard until brown. Serve hot with tomato-sauce.
A plain French-style meatball, fried rather than simmered. The recipe assumes you are mincing the meat yourself, which changes the texture more than anything else here.
- The meat"Chop and mince 1 pound of round steak" means grinding it at home, coarsely and with very little fat. Ready-ground beef at around 85/15 works, but the mixture will be softer and richer; if you grind round yourself, chill the meat and the grinder parts first so the fat does not smear.
- BindingOne egg, melted butter and lemon juice against a pound of lean meat gives a loose mixture with no breadcrumb or panade to hold it. Chill the mixture for 30 minutes before shaping, and roll the balls firmly, or they will slump and shed in the fat.
- Frying temperature"Deep hot lard" means about 350-365F. Below that the flour coating soaks; much above and the outside browns before a walnut-sized ball is cooked through. Fry in batches so the fat does not drop.
- DonenessGround beef should reach 160F internally. Balls of about 1 1/2 inches take roughly four to five minutes; cut one open from the first batch to check before committing the rest.
- FatLard is still the closest thing to the original and fries cleanly at this temperature. Any neutral oil with a high smoke point substitutes without much loss.
- "Season highly"Taken at face value: about 1 1/4 teaspoons salt per pound, a generous quantity of black pepper, and a genuine pinch of cayenne. Fry a teaspoon of the mixture flat in a pan and taste it before shaping the rest.
- The sauceNo tomato sauce is given, and in cookery of this period the phrase generally meant a smooth cooked sauce of tomatoes, stock and butter thickened lightly with roux, not a long-simmered Italian sugo. A simple passata reduced with butter and a little onion is in keeping.
- YieldA pound of meat makes roughly a dozen to sixteen balls depending on the size shaped, enough for three or four with potatoes or rice.
Boulette is simply French for "little ball," and the word covers a wide family of croquettes and meatballs across French and Belgian home cooking, where it is commonly associated with using up trimmings or the tough end of a joint. This version belongs to the American cookbook tradition of the period rather than to any regional French kitchen: a daily calendar of dishes labelled by nationality, in which "French" often meant little more than lemon juice, butter, parsley and a light hand with the sauce. The use of round steak minced at home fits the date. Household grinders were widely available by the turn of the century, and period cookbooks often advised buying a cheap cut whole and mincing it at home rather than trusting already-ground meat, which had a poor reputation for freshness and for what it contained.