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Soup with Egg Balls

A clear soup made with stock, carrot, and small balls of beaten egg and flour.

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 ↓

Soup with Egg Balls

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the stock

  1. Boil stock with a carrot.

  2. Strain the stock through a fine sieve.

Make the egg balls

  1. In a bowl, beat the butter until creamy.

  2. Add the egg yolks, whole egg, and flour; mix well.

  3. Spoon walnut-sized pieces of the mixture into the boiling soup.

  4. Cook the balls lightly.

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. Flour + carrottop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,029 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Butter + carrottop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,083 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

Butter
Creamed butter gives the balls richness and a tender, soft texture.
Egg yolks
Yolks add richness and help bind the mixture into soft balls.
Whole egg
The whole egg adds structure, helping the balls hold together when cooked.
Fine flour
Flour gives the balls body so they hold their shape in the soup.

The step that matters

Cook the balls lightly. Egg-based mixtures set quickly and turn tough or rubbery if boiled hard for too long. Gentle simmering keeps them tender and intact.

Swap the carrot

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, egg, flour):

  1. Chivefits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Leekfits better
  4. Carrotthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, egg, flour. 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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