Egg Balls
Six hard boiled eggs and four yolks of egg; pound all in a mortar and rub through a hairsieve, then sift a little flour over them on a board, roll them into balls the size of marbles, poach them very carefully, add them to the mock turtle soup just before sending to table.
A garnish rather than a dish: small egg dumplings dropped into mock turtle soup at the last moment, standing in for the eggs of a real turtle. The whole thing takes ten minutes once the eggs are cooked.
- The hinge: keep the water below a simmerPoach in water that barely trembles, around 180F, and lift the balls out after two to three minutes, when they firm up. A rolling boil breaks them apart, which is why the original says "very carefully."
- HairsieveA fine-mesh sieve of woven horsehair. Any fine metal strainer does the job; push the pounded egg through with a rubber spatula, or use a potato ricer or drum sieve for the same effect.
- Pound, then sieve, in that orderA mortar or a food processor pulsed briefly gives a paste; the sieving is what removes the last lumps of white and makes the balls smooth. Skipping it leaves them grainy and prone to crumbling in the pot.
- The four raw yolks are the binderThe four extra yolks are the binder -- The original does not say whether they are raw, though the contrast with the six hard-boiled eggs suggests they are; either way they hold the mixture together, so do not reduce them. The flour is only 'a little', sifted over the mixture on the board -- work in as little as possible or the balls turn pasty.
- Size"The size of marbles" suggests balls of roughly a half to three-quarters of an inch, about a rounded teaspoon of mixture. Larger balls will need correspondingly longer in the water.
- SeasoningThe original gives none. Salt the mixture, and if you like add a grating of nutmeg or a little cayenne, both common in mock turtle seasonings; unseasoned egg balls taste flat against a strong brown soup.
- Yield and timingSix eggs plus four yolks make several dozen small balls, ample garnish for a large tureen. Poach them shortly before service and hold in warm soup or warm water -- reheating in boiling liquid destroys them.
Egg balls belong entirely to mock turtle soup, the great imitation dish of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Real turtle soup, made from green turtles shipped live from the West Indies, was prized for two things a calf's head could not supply: the gelatinous green fat and the small round eggs found in the shell. Cooks reproduced the first with strips of calf's head and the second with these little poached spheres, which is why a recipe that is technically a dumpling sits in the soup chapter with no dish of its own. Mock turtle recipes appear in Hannah Glasse and in her successors, and the convention survived long enough to appear in late-Victorian and Edwardian professional manuals like this one, where mock turtle was still a standard soup for a formal dinner. Turtle itself is now protected, so the imitation has outlived the original.