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Egg-balls for Soup

Egg balls made from boiled and raw egg yolks, flour, and salt, dropped into boiling water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 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 for Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. Mash the hard-boiled egg yolks until smooth.

  2. Mix in the raw egg yolks and a little flour, along with salt to taste.

  3. Roll the mixture into small balls.

Cook

  1. Drop the balls into boiling water.

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).

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
Mashed, they form the soft, rich body of the balls.
Raw egg yolks
They bind the mixture and set when heated, holding the balls together.
Flour
It absorbs moisture and helps the mixture keep its shape.

The step that matters

Drop the balls into boiling water.. The raw yolk only sets when it is hot enough, so the water must be at a full boil. In cooler water the balls can fall apart or cook unevenly, because the proteins need heat to coagulate and hold the ball together.

“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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