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Forcemeat Balls, Egg
Pound the hard-boiled yolks of half a dozen eggs with some chopped parsley, a tea-spoonful of flour, a little pepper, salt, and cayenne. Moisten with egg, and make the paste into small balls. Boil for two minutes before using in soup or other dishes. Probable cost, 8d. Sufficient for one tureen of soup.
A quick garnish for clear soups, made from hard-boiled yolks bound with raw egg. The whole thing takes ten minutes and the only real risk is a paste too wet to hold its shape.
- The hinge: a stiff pasteAdd the raw egg a teaspoon at a time until the pounded yolks just cohere. A loose mixture disintegrates the moment it hits simmering liquid, clouding the soup it was meant to decorate.
- Pounding without a mortarPress the cooked yolks through a fine sieve rather than mashing them with a fork; the texture should be powdery and even. A mortar or the back of a spoon against a sieve both work better than a food processor, which turns yolk gluey.
- Scale of the balls"Small" here means roughly pea-sized. Six yolks make a batch sufficient for the one tureen of soup the recipe specifies.
- Two minutes means two minutesThey are already cooked; the boiling only sets the raw egg binding them. Longer and they swell, soften and break up. Slip them into barely simmering salted water or stock, not a rolling boil.
- Cayenne quantityThe original gives no precise quantity, only "a little." A pinch for the batch is right — this is a seasoning note against the flat richness of yolk, not a chilli garnish.
- Probable cost, 8dEightpence in late-Victorian money; Cassell's attached a probable cost to most of its recipe entries. It has no modern equivalent worth calculating.
- ServingAdd them to the tureen at the last moment, or drop them into individual plates. Held in hot soup they go soft within a few minutes.
Forcemeat balls were once standard furniture in English soup cookery: mock turtle, hare and giblet soups all arrived studded with them, and the eighteenth-century versions were built on veal, suet and breadcrumbs. This egg variant is the cheap, quick, meatless cousin — the same idea of a seasoned bound paste poached into small spheres, with hard yolk doing the work of pounded veal. It was treated as a component, something a cook produced to order and dropped into whatever tureen needed dressing up. The reflex survives in the egg balls still called for in old American mock turtle recipes, and, more distantly, in every clear soup that arrives with something small and neat floating in it.