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Egg Balls Foe Soup

Egg balls made from hard‑boiled and raw eggs, butter, pepper, salt, and flour, boiled briefly in soup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Egg Balls Foe Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the paste

  1. Mash the yolks of the hard-boiled eggs into a smooth paste.

  2. Mix in melted butter, pepper, and salt.

  3. Add the raw eggs and beat until light.

  4. Incorporate enough flour to form a cohesive paste.

Shape and cook

  1. Shape the mixture into balls using floured hands.

  2. Place the balls in a cool place until ready to cook.

  3. Just before serving the soup, carefully add the balls and boil for 1 minute.

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. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 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 + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Butter + peppertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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
Form the smooth, rich base of the paste.
Raw eggs
Bind the mixture and add structure as they set when cooked.
Melted butter
Adds fat for a tender texture and rich flavour.
Flour
Thickens the paste so the balls hold their shape.

The step that matters

Boiling the balls in the soup. The balls must be added just before serving and boiled only briefly. Raw egg proteins set when heated, so overcooking can make them tough and rubbery, and the balls can break up if the soup boils hard for too long.

“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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