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Egg Balls
4 hard-cooked eggs 1 raw egg yolk flour or salt and cayenne 1 white of egg sifted cracker crumbs Mash yolks of eggs, add seasonings, and enough yolk of egg to form a paste. Shape into balls the size of a walnut, dip in slightly beaten white of egg, dip in flour or cracker crumbs, and fry in deep fat. Drain and serve with soup.
A soup garnish rather than a dish in its own right, and one that lives or dies by the consistency of the yolk paste. A few notes before you start.
- The hinge: paste consistencyAdd the raw yolk a little at a time until the mashed cooked yolks just hold together under pressure. Too wet and the balls slump and burst in the fat; too dry and they crumble when you dip them.
- Reading the ingredient listThe line "flour or salt and cayenne" is a garbled column of type. What is meant is salt and cayenne for seasoning, and flour or sifted cracker crumbs for the coating.
- Frying temperatureThe book gives no temperature. Period cookbooks judged deep fat with a cube of bread: browning in about forty seconds indicated fat hot enough for an already-cooked mixture such as this, roughly 375F. Below that the balls absorb grease; much above it the coating colors before the inside heats through.
- Cracker crumbsPeriod cracker crumbs were usually made from plain soda or water crackers, dried and rolled fine. Unsalted saltines or plain water biscuits crushed and sifted give a similar fine, sandy coating; panko is coarser than suits a walnut-sized ball.
- Cooking timeThese need only 30 to 60 seconds. Everything inside is already cooked, so you are setting the coating and nothing more.
- Hard-cooking the eggsYolks that have gone gray-green and chalky mash into a gritty paste. Bring to a bare simmer, hold 10 minutes off the heat, then cool in cold water.
- Yield and servingFour yolks make roughly 10 to 12 walnut-sized balls, enough to garnish four to six bowls. Drop them into clear soup, mock turtle or consomme at the table; they soften quickly once they sit in liquid.
Egg balls belong to the long tradition of soup garnishes that English and American cooks inherited from eighteenth-century forcemeat practice, where a clear soup was expected to arrive with something solid floating in it: quenelles, forcemeat balls, or these. They are often associated with mock turtle soup, where the small pale balls are said to stand in for the turtle eggs of the genuine article. Lowney's Cook Book was compiled by Maria Willett Howard for the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer, and like many house cookbooks of the era it ranged well beyond the sponsor's product into general household cookery. The recipe's brevity reflects an assumption now gone: that a cook reading it already knew what depth of fat, what heat, and what soup were meant.