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Egg Balls for Soup

Egg balls made from yolks and flour, boiled until they float, then added to soup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 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. Remove the shell from the hard-boiled egg and discard the white.

  2. Sieve the yolk and mix it with the raw egg yolk, salt, and Cayenne pepper.

  3. Add flour gradually until the mixture is firm enough to roll into small balls.

  4. Roll the mixture into little balls between your palms.

Cook and serve

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

  2. Skim them out and add to your desired dish.

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
Adds rich egg flavour and a crumbly, tender body to the dough.
Raw egg yolk
Binds the crumbled yolk so the mixture holds together when rolled.
Flour
Gives structure, so the mixture becomes firm enough to shape into balls.

The step that matters

Adding the flour gradually. Flour absorbs liquid from the yolks and firms the dough as it is added. Adding it all at once can make the mixture stiff and dry, so the balls crack or fall apart. Adding it slowly lets you stop once the dough is firm enough to roll.

“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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