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Forcemeat-balls Fob Soup

Forcemeat balls made from minced chicken, egg yolks, and flour, poached and added to soup.

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 ↓

Forcemeat-balls Fob Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the mixture

  1. Rub the minced chicken through a sieve with a wooden spoon.

  2. Rub the hard-boiled egg yolks through the sieve.

  3. Mix the chicken, hard yolks, raw egg yolk, salt, pepper, and enough flour to form a paste.

  4. Roll the mixture into small oval balls between your palms.

Cook and serve

  1. Poach the balls in salted boiling water until they float.

  2. Add the poached balls to hot soup.

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. Chicken + peppertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,958 recipes

    Shared aroma: piperonal (bitter, coconut).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Chicken + flourtop 27% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together10,559 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetaldehyde (pungent, ethereal).

  5. Chicken + eggtop 30% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,991 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

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

Cold chicken
Provides the main body of the meatballs, so the balls are mostly meat.
Hard-boiled eggs
Their yolks blend into the mixture and add richness and a firm, tender texture.
Raw egg yolk
Binds the mixture together so the balls hold their shape while poaching.
Flour
Thickens the mixture into a paste that helps the balls hold together.

The step that matters

Sieving the chicken and yolks. Pushing the meat and hard yolks through a sieve breaks them into very fine particles. Coarse pieces would make the balls crumbly and uneven, so the texture stays smooth and tender.

“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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