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Egg-balls for Fish

Egg balls made from hard-boiled eggs, flour, salt, and beaten egg, boiled until cooked.

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 Fish

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. Remove the yolks from the hard-boiled eggs and pound them smooth in a mortar.

  2. Add a little flour and coarse sea salt to the yolks.

  3. Chop the egg whites and mix them with the yolk mixture, moistening it with the beaten egg.

  4. Form the mixture into balls.

Cook

  1. Boil the balls in water for a few minutes, just long enough to cook the flour.

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 eggs
Provide the main body of the balls, with yolks pounded smooth and whites chopped through.
Flour
Adds starch that sets during boiling, helping the balls hold their shape.
Beaten egg
Moistens the mixture so it binds together and can be formed into balls.

The step that matters

Boil the balls for only a few minutes. Boiling just long enough to cook the flour keeps the balls from breaking apart or becoming rubbery, since prolonged heat tightens egg proteins further.

“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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