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Egg Balls

Egg Balls are small, boiled egg-based spheres made from mashed eggs, flour, salt, and parsley.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and parsley are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 16,675 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Egg Balls

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the eggs

  1. Boil 4 eggs until the yolks are dry and mealy.

  2. Place the eggs in cold water.

  3. Mash both the whites and yolks through a fine sieve.

Form and cook

  1. Add the yolk of 1 raw egg, 1 teaspoon of flour, salt, and parsley.

  2. Form the mixture into balls.

  3. Boil the balls for 4 to 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. Flour + parsleytop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together16,675 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 + parsleytop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,765 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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 eggs
Provide the main body of the balls, with mashed whites and yolks giving a fine, crumbly texture.
Raw egg yolk
Binds the mashed egg together so the balls hold their shape during cooking.
Flour
Adds a little body to the mixture, helping it hold together when formed and boiled.

The step that matters

Mash the eggs through a fine sieve. Pressing the cooked eggs through a fine sieve breaks them into smooth, fine particles. Coarse lumps of yolk or white would make the mixture uneven and harder to bind into balls that hold their shape.

Swap the parsley

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (egg, flour):

  1. Jalapenofits better
  2. Capersfits better
  3. Nutmegfits better
  4. Parsleythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, flour. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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