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Egg Balls
To one egg put just as little flour as will make it into a paste that you can pinch into shape with your fingers. Season with pepper, a little grated nutmeg, and a little chopped lemon-peel cut very thin. Work these into pellets the size of marbles, making a few of them long like miniature sausages. Put them into boiling broth, and let them boil very quickly till their substance is set.
A soup garnish rather than a dish in itself: tiny egg-and-flour dumplings poached in the broth they will be served in. The proportions are deliberately vague because everything depends on the flour.
- The hinge: dough stiffnessAdd flour a spoonful at a time until the paste just stops sticking to your fingers and can be rolled. The amount depends on the egg and on the flour, which is why the original gives no figure — work by feel. Any wetter and the balls tend to break up in the broth; any drier and they cook to pebbles.
- "Boil very quickly"This means a hard, rolling boil, not a simmer. The rapid movement sets the outside before the paste can slump. Small pellets take only a few minutes; the recipe's own test is that their substance is set, i.e. firm through.
- Cook them separatelyCooking them -- The recipe puts them straight into boiling broth. If you are serving a clear soup and want to keep it bright, boil them instead in a separate pan of the same broth, or in salted water, and lift them into the soup at the last moment.
- Lemon-peel"Cut very thin" points to the yellow zest only, pared and then chopped very fine, with no white pith. A fine microplane zest does the same job. The recipe specifies only "a little".
- Nutmeg and saltGrate the nutmeg fresh; pre-ground loses the point of "a little." The recipe calls for no salt — presumably left to the broth — but a pinch in the paste helps.
- YieldOne egg makes roughly a couple of dozen marble-sized balls, enough to garnish a few bowls of clear soup. Best made and used the same day.
Egg balls belong to the nineteenth-century vocabulary of soup garnishes, alongside forcemeat quenelles, custard royale and vermicelli — small set shapes that gave a clear broth something to hold. They are commonly associated with mock turtle soup, where the pale globes stood in for the turtle's eggs, and they turn up in that role in English and American cookery books throughout the 1800s. Many versions are built on sieved hard-boiled yolks bound with raw yolk and a little flour; the method here is the simpler kind, a plain egg-and-flour paste seasoned with the standard Victorian trio of pepper, nutmeg and lemon-peel. What matters is less the dish than the technique — the setting of egg protein in rapidly boiling liquid — offered as a building block for soups.