Egg Balls
Few drops onion juice. 1 teaspoon thick cream. 1/4 teaspoon finely chopped. parsley.
PROCESS: Mash yolk, rub through a sieve, add finely chopped. white, seasonings, parsley and cream. Moisten with some of the yolk of a raw egg until of the consistency to handle. Shape with the hands in tiny balls and poach two minutes in boiling water or a little consommé. Remove with skimmer. Serve at once.
This is a soup garnish rather than a dish in its own right, and the printed text has lost the head of its ingredient list — the eggs themselves are missing. Read it as: hard-boiled eggs (two will do), onion juice, cream, parsley, salt and a little cayenne or paprika, plus a raw yolk to bind.
- What the missing quantities wereThe surviving text gives singular "yolk" and "white", so the head of the list was probably one or two hard-cooked eggs to the teaspoon of cream and quarter-teaspoon of parsley. The "seasonings" are not specified anywhere in the text -- salt and pepper, or cayenne, would be the usual choices -- so season to taste.
- Onion juiceNot a bottled product. Halve an onion and scrape the cut face with the edge of a spoon, or grate it on the fine side of a box grater and press the pulp; a few drops is genuinely all that is wanted, or the garnish tastes of onion and nothing else.
- Thick creamHere this means unwhipped cream of high butterfat. Heavy or double cream is the equivalent; half-and-half will not carry the same richness but works.
- The sieve is not optionalThe sieve -- The recipe has the cooked yolk rubbed through a sieve rather than merely mashed, which gives a smoother paste to roll; a coarser mixture is likelier to break up in the poaching water.
- Bind sparinglyAdd the raw yolk a little at a time. Too much and the mixture will not hold a shape at all; you want a stiff paste that just stops sticking to dry hands. Chilling it for fifteen minutes before rolling makes shaping much easier.
- Size and cooking"Tiny" is not defined; pea to small-marble size is a reasonable reading for something meant to float in clear soup. The recipe says boiling water, though a bare simmer handles them more gently, and it allows two minutes.
- Raw yolkThe binder is uncooked when it goes in, and two minutes in barely simmering water is a short cook for the interior of a paste ball. If you are serving anyone who should avoid undercooked egg, use pasteurized eggs for the binding yolk.
Egg balls belong to the vanished world of the garnished clear soup, where a bowl of consommé was expected to arrive carrying something — custard cut in diamonds, tiny quenelles, forcemeat balls, or these. They are most closely associated with mock turtle soup, where the small yellow spheres are often said to have stood in for the green fat and the eggs of real sea turtle, and nineteenth-century English and American cookbooks frequently print them in that context. The technique — sieved yolk bound with raw yolk and poached — is the same one behind the forcemeat and quenelle work of the classical kitchen, scaled down to something a household cook could manage between other jobs.