Skip to main content
Main

Egg Balls for Mock Turtle, &C.

Egg balls made from boiled eggs, yolks, pepper, salt, and flour, boiled in gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 Mock Turtle, &C.

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the yolks

  1. Boil the eggs hard and place them in cold water.

  2. Remove the yolks and pound them very fine in a mortar.

  3. Wet the yolks with 3 raw yolks.

Shape and cook

  1. Season with white pepper and coarse sea salt.

  2. Add flour to dry the mixture.

  3. Roll into small balls, as they swell when boiled.

  4. Boil the balls in gravy for a few minutes.

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. Egg + white peppertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,312 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methylbutyraldehyde (malty, chocolate).

  3. White pepper + flourtop 32% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,228 recipes

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 filling once the yolks are pounded fine.
Raw egg yolks
Add moisture and richness that bind the pounded yolk mixture together.
Flour
Absorbs moisture so the mixture holds its shape when rolled into balls.

The step that matters

Add flour to dry the mixture. Too much flour makes the balls dense and tough, while too little leaves them too soft to hold their shape in the gravy.

Swap the white pepper

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

  1. Jalapenofits better
  2. Capersfits better
  3. Nutmegfits better
  4. White pepperthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against 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.

You might also like

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesYorkshire PuddingYorkshire Pudding264 recipes