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Soup

Egg Balls for Soup

Egg Balls for Soup are small balls made from hard‑boiled egg yolks, raw egg 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

Make the dough

  1. In a bowl, rub the hard-boiled egg yolks smooth with the raw egg yolks and wheat flour.

  2. Add the salt and mix well.

  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 body of the balls, giving a soft, crumbly texture.
Raw egg yolks
Bind the mixture and help the balls set when heated.
Wheat flour
Absorbs moisture and helps the balls hold their shape.

The step that matters

Drop the balls into boiling soup a few minutes before serving.. The balls are held together only by yolk and flour, so they can break apart if the mixture is too loose. Heat from boiling soup sets the outside quickly, helping the balls keep their shape while they cook.

“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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