Skip to main content
Main

Egg-balls

Egg Balls are small, boiled egg-based spheres made from yolk and white mixtures seasoned with parsley, pepper, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Parsley and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 34,122 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Egg-balls

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the eggs

  1. Boil the eggs for 12-15 minutes, then place them in cold water to cool.

  2. Peel the eggs and separate the yolks from the whites.

Shape the balls

  1. In a mortar, smooth the yolks and mix in the raw egg yolk, parsley, pepper, and salt.

  2. Form the yolk mixture into balls.

  3. Smooth the egg whites and mix in the raw egg white, parsley, and a pinch of salt and pepper.

  4. Form the white mixture into balls.

Cook and serve

  1. Boil the balls gently for 2-3 minutes to avoid breaking.

  2. Arrange the balls on a dish, alternating between white and yellow.

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. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  2. Egg + parsleytop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,765 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  3. Egg + peppertop 33% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together50,580 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Egg and pepper barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 50,580 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
Form the main body of the balls, giving a firm, sliceable base once smoothed.
Raw egg yolk
Binds the smoothed yolk mixture so the balls hold together.
Raw egg white
Binds the smoothed white mixture so the balls hold their shape.

The step that matters

Boil the balls gently. Raw egg in the mixture sets when heated, but vigorous boiling can crack or break the balls apart. A gentle simmer lets the binding egg set slowly and keeps the shapes intact.

“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.

More egg balls recipes

for Soup 46Bacon 7Mock Turtle 4 See all 90 →

You might also like

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