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Marrowball Soup

A soup made with marrowballs cooked in boiling stock.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Egg and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 22,662 recipes. Both carry (e)-2-octenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Marrowball Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the marrowball mixture

  1. Melt the piece of marrow slowly until slightly cooled.

  2. Add the grated bread crumbs, egg yolk, salt, nutmeg, and mix well with a little cold water.

Cook the marrowballs

  1. Take a teaspoonful of the mixture and drop it into boiling stock without covering the kettle.

  2. If the ball falls apart, add more bread crumbs.

  3. Let the balls boil slowly for three 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 + breadtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

  2. Bread + nutmegtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,997 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  3. Egg + nutmegtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together24,744 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

Egg and nutmeg barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 24,744 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

Marrow
Adds richness and fat, giving the balls a moist, savoury body.
Bread crumbs
Absorb moisture and bind the mixture so the balls hold their shape.
Egg yolk
Binds the mixture and helps the balls set when heated.

The step that matters

Dropping the balls into boiling stock. If the mixture is too wet, the balls fall apart in the stock. Adding more bread crumbs firms the mixture so each ball holds together while it cooks.

“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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