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Egg Balls for Soup

Egg balls made from boiled and raw yolks, wheat flour, and salt, dropped into soup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Wheat and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,373 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Egg Balls for Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Mash the yolks of the hard-boiled eggs in a bowl.

  2. Add the raw egg yolks and wheat flour, and mix until smooth.

  3. Form the mixture into small balls.

Serve

  1. Drop the balls into boiling soup a few minutes before serving.

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. Wheat + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,373 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 + wheattop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,225 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Egg and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 106,462 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

Hard-boiled egg yolks
Form the bulk of the balls and add rich, creamy body.
Raw egg yolks
Bind the mashed yolks together so the balls hold their shape.
Wheat flour
Adds starch that helps the mixture firm up and hold together.

The step that matters

Dropping the balls into boiling soup. Adding the balls to soup that is only simmering or cooler can make them break apart or stay loose. Boiling water sets the raw yolk and flour so the balls firm up and keep their shape.

“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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