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Egg Balls

Egg Balls are boiled eggs with yolk mixture, shaped into balls, rolled in flour, and fried or simmered in soup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and flour 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 yolks

  1. Boil the eggs for 20 minutes.

  2. Transfer them to cold water until cool, then remove the shells.

  3. Carefully cut through the egg whites and remove the yolks whole.

  4. Cut the yolks into quarters or rub them into a smooth paste.

Shape the balls

  1. Mix the yolks with melted butter, salt, and pepper.

  2. Moisten the mixture with enough raw egg white or yolk to shape easily.

  3. Shape the mixture into balls about the size of a nutmeg.

  4. Roll the balls in flour.

Cook and serve

  1. Fry in butter until brown, or drop into hot soup and cook for 5 minutes.

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. Butter + flourtop 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. Butter + peppertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

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

Butter and flour 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
Hard-boiled yolks form the body of the balls, giving them a firm, crumbly structure.
Melted butter
Adds richness and moisture, helping the yolk mixture hold together and feel smooth.
Raw egg white or yolk
Binds the mashed yolks so the mixture holds its shape when rolled and fried.
Flour
Dry coating that helps the outside brown and form a light crust during frying.

The step that matters

Moisten the mixture with raw egg. Cooked yolk alone is crumbly. Adding just enough raw egg binds it into a shapeable dough; too much makes it sticky and hard to fry.

“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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