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Egg-balls Fob Soup

A soup containing small egg balls made from boiled and raw egg yolks, oil, spices, and flour.

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

Egg-balls Fob Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the dough

  1. Peel the hard-boiled egg and separate the yolk from the white. Crush the yolk finely with a fork.

  2. Mix the crushed yolk with the raw egg yolk, salad oil, cayenne, and salt. Add flour gradually until the mixture can be rolled into small balls.

  3. Flour your hands slightly and roll the mixture into little balls.

Cook and serve

  1. Bring a saucepan of salted water to a boil.

  2. Drop the egg balls into the boiling water and cook until they float.

  3. Remove the egg balls with a skimmer and add them to the soup 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. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Egg + peppertop 33% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together50,580 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
Its crushed yolk forms the body of the dough mixture.
Raw egg yolk
Binds the crushed yolk into a cohesive, rollable mixture.
Salad oil
Adds fat, keeping the dough tender and moist.
Flour
Gives structure so the mixture holds its shape when rolled and cooked.

The step that matters

Adding the flour gradually. Adding flour in small amounts lets you stop once the mixture is rollable. Too much flour makes the balls dense and tough, while too little leaves them fragile and likely to break apart in the boiling water.

“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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