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Cheese Balls

Cheese balls are fried balls made from grated cheese, flour, egg, and seasoning.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Cheese Balls

Why it works: Egg and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 106,462 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Cheese Balls

Ingredients

Directions

Make the mixture

  1. In a bowl, mix the grated cheese, flour, and egg yolk to form a paste.

  2. Add flavouring to taste and stir in the well-beaten egg white.

Fry

  1. Heat oil in a pan until boiling.

  2. Drop small balls of the mixture into the hot oil and fry until nicely browned.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Cheese + eggtop 28% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,253 recipes

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

  3. Cheese + flourtop 29% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,860 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, 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

Grated cheese
Adds savoury flavour and richness, and gives the balls a rich, cheesy taste.
Flour
Thickens the mixture into a paste so the balls hold their shape.
Egg
Binds the mixture together, and the beaten white adds lightness and helps the balls set when fried.

The step that matters

Drop the balls into hot oil. The oil must be hot enough to set the outside of each ball quickly. This seals the surface, helps the balls hold their shape, and keeps them from soaking up grease while they brown.

“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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