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Walnut Balls for Soups

Small walnut balls made with bread crumbs, egg yolks, and nut milk, served hot in soup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,466 recipes. Both carry 2-undecenal, which smells sweet. The science ↓

Walnut Balls for Soups

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the balls

  1. Mix the bread crumbs, egg yolks, and ground walnut meats in a bowl.

  2. Season with coarse sea salt and bind the mixture with nut milk.

  3. Form the mixture into balls the size of a hickory nut.

Cook and serve

  1. Cook the balls in the soup for 20 minutes.

  2. Serve the walnut balls hot with the 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. Bread + milktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  2. Walnut + meattop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,035 recipes

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

  3. Bread + eggtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

  4. Bread + meattop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,924 recipes

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

  5. Walnut + milktop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,236 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-hexanal (fruit).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Bread crumbs
Absorb moisture and give the balls body so they hold their shape.
Egg yolks
Bind the mixture and set when cooked, holding the balls together.
Walnut meats
Provide the main flavour and a coarse, rich texture to the balls.
Nut milk
Moistens the crumbs and egg so the mixture can be shaped into balls.

The step that matters

Form the mixture into balls. If the mixture is too wet or too dry, the balls may fall apart in the soup. The binding from the crumbs and yolks needs to be firm enough to hold their shape while they cook.

Swap the walnut

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

  1. Pecansfits better
  2. Cocoafits about as well
  3. Peasfits about as well
  4. Walnutthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, egg, meat, milk. 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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