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Egg Balls for Soup

Egg balls made from boiled and raw egg yolks, flour, and salt, dropped into 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

Prepare

  1. In a bowl, mash the yolks of 6 hard-boiled eggs.

  2. Add 2 raw egg yolks, 1 tablespoon of wheat flour, and 1 teaspoon of salt; mix until smooth.

  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
Form the bulk of the balls and give them a rich, creamy body.
Raw egg yolks
Bind the mashed yolks together so the balls hold their shape.
Wheat flour
Adds starch that helps the mixture hold together and firm up slightly.

The step that matters

Drop the balls into boiling soup a few minutes before serving. Raw egg yolks in the mixture set when heated. Adding the balls to boiling soup cooks them through, while leaving them too long can make them tough or cause them to break 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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