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Egg-balls for Soup

Egg balls made from boiled and raw yolks, oil, spices, and flour, boiled until they float 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 ↓

Egg-balls for Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the dough

  1. Boil one egg hard, then separate the yolk from the white.

  2. Break the yolk very fine with a fork.

  3. Add the raw egg yolk, salad oil, cayenne, and salt to the boiled yolk.

  4. Mix in enough flour to form a paste that can be rolled into small balls.

  5. Flour your hands slightly and roll the mixture into little balls.

Cook and serve

  1. Bring a saucepan of salted water to a boil.

  2. Drop the egg balls into the boiling water and cook until they float.

  3. Remove them with a skimmer and add to your soup before serving.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Egg + peppertop 33% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together50,580 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, 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 yolk
Forms the soft, crumbly base of the dough, giving the balls body and richness.
Raw egg yolk
Binds the mixture together and adds richness and tenderness.
Salad oil
Adds fat, keeping the dough moist and soft rather than dry.
Flour
Provides structure, letting the paste hold its shape when rolled and cooked.

The step that matters

Cook until they float. Raw egg yolk and flour set as they cook, so the balls are done when they float, showing they have heated through. Cooking too briefly leaves them raw in the center, while overcrowding the pot can make them stick together and cook unevenly.

“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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