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Egg Balls for Soup

Egg balls made from mashed egg yolks, wheat flour, and salt, formed into small spheres and added to soup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Wheat and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,373 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Egg Balls for Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. In a bowl, mash the yolks of 6 hard boiled eggs with ½ tablespoon of wheat flour until smooth.

  2. Add 2 raw egg yolks and 1 teaspoon of salt, mixing well.

  3. Form the mixture into small balls.

Serve

  1. Drop the balls into boiling soup a few minutes 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. Wheat + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,373 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 + wheattop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,225 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 yolks
Provide the bulk and rich, creamy body of the balls.
Wheat flour
Adds light structure so the mashed yolks hold their shape.
Raw egg yolks
Bind the mixture together and add richness through their fat and emulsifiers.

The step that matters

Drop the balls into boiling soup a few minutes before serving. Raw egg yolks in the balls set when heated. Adding them to boiling soup only briefly cooks them through, so they stay tender and hold together without breaking apart.

“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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