Skip to main content
Main

Egg Balls

Egg Balls are small, fried balls made from mashed egg yolks mixed with egg white, pepper, salt, and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Flour and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Egg Balls

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the filling

  1. Boil the desired number of eggs for 10 minutes.

  2. Drop them in cold water until cool, then peel and cut each egg in half lengthwise.

  3. Remove the yolks and mash them into a paste.

  4. Stir in the white of 1 egg and season with pepper and coarse sea salt.

  5. Form the mixture into balls the size and shape of walnuts.

Fry and assemble

  1. Roll the balls in flour and fry them in hot butter until browned.

  2. Place one ball in each half of the egg.

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. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Egg + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  4. Pepper + flourtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together50,459 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Pepper + buttertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Eggs
Provide the set white shells and the yolk base that forms the filling.
1 egg white
Binds the mashed yolks into a paste that holds its shape.
Flour
Coats the balls so they brown evenly and develop a crisp exterior when fried.
Butter
Fat for frying that adds richness and browns the flour coating.

The step that matters

Fry the balls in hot butter until browned. Flour-coated balls need enough heat to brown quickly; if the butter is too cool, they absorb grease and turn soggy instead of crisp.

“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.

More egg balls recipes

for Soup 46Bacon 7Mock Turtle 4 See all 90 →

You might also like

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesYorkshire PuddingYorkshire Pudding264 recipes