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Egg Balls for Soup

Egg balls made from hard‑boiled eggs, raw egg, flour, pepper, and salt, boiled briefly in 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 egg balls

  1. Boil the hard‑boiled eggs until quite hard.

  2. Mash the yolks finely in a bowl.

  3. Add the raw egg, flour, pepper, and salt to the mashed yolks. Mix until well combined and form into small balls.

Finish in the soup

  1. Add the egg balls to the soup and boil for a few moments 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. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Flour + peppertop 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 eggs
Mashed yolks form the body of the egg balls.
Raw egg
Binds the mashed yolks so the balls hold their shape.
Flour
Absorbs moisture and adds body so the mixture holds together.

The step that matters

Mixing the binder into the yolks. Mashing the yolks finely and mixing well spreads the raw egg and flour evenly. Lumps or uneven binding can make balls that crumble in the soup or stay dry in spots.

“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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