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Egg Balls for Soups

Egg balls are small, smooth spheres made from boiled egg yolks, butter, eggs, and flour, served in soup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Egg Balls for Soups

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. Rub the yolks of the hard boiled eggs with melted butter until smooth.

  2. Season the mixture with salt and pepper.

  3. Add the raw eggs and mix lightly.

  4. Incorporate enough flour to hold the paste together.

Shape and cook

  1. Mould the mixture into balls using floured hands and place in a cool place until ready to serve.

  2. Carefully add the balls to boiling soup and cook for 1 minute 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. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 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 + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  4. Pepper + flourtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together50,459 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Butter + peppertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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
Provide the rich, crumbly base that forms the body of the balls.
Raw eggs
Bind the mixture and set when heated, holding the balls together in the soup.
Melted butter
Adds richness and moisture, helping the yolks blend into a smooth paste.
Flour
Absorbs moisture and gives the paste enough body to hold its shape.

The step that matters

Adding the balls to the soup. The balls are fragile until the raw egg sets, so they must be added carefully to boiling soup. Keeping the soup at a steady boil and adding them gently prevents breaking, and the short one-minute cook is enough to set the eggs without toughening them.

“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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