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Egg Balls
Five eggs; one teaspoon of salt; a little pepper.
Boil four of the eggs twenty minutes and mash the yolks to a smooth paste in a bowl; then add the salt and pepper, and the
The text breaks off mid-instruction, but the method is a standard one and the missing half is recoverable from the pattern: sieved hard yolks bound with the fifth egg, rolled small, and cooked briefly to firm them. A few notes on the parts that have dated.
- The recipe is truncatedThe page cuts off after "and the" — what follows in versions of this garnish is the fifth egg, raw, worked into the yolk paste as a binder. Treat what survives as the filling stage only.
- Twenty minutes is too longBoiled that hard, yolks turn chalky and develop the grey-green sulphide ring, which carries a faint sulphur taste into the soup. Ten to twelve minutes at a bare simmer gives fully set yolks that still mash sweet and smooth.
- Sieve rather than mashA bowl and spoon leave lumps that break the balls apart in liquid. Pushing the yolks through a fine sieve gives the smooth paste the recipe asks for and lets them absorb the raw egg evenly.
- SizeSoup accessories of this kind were often rolled the size of a small marble or hazelnut — large enough to spoon up, small enough to cook through in a minute.
- Cooking themDrop into gently simmering salted water or clear stock for one to two minutes, until they float and firm. A rolling boil disintegrates them. Some period versions instead roll the balls in flour and fry them in butter.
- Add at the last momentEgg balls go into the tureen or the individual plates and have the hot soup poured over. Left sitting in the pot they swell, soften and cloud the broth.
- SeasoningA teaspoon of salt for four yolks is generous by modern taste, particularly if the balls go into an already-seasoned consommé. Season the paste, taste it, and stop there.
Egg balls belong to the nineteenth-century category of "soup accessories" — small made garnishes, alongside forcemeat balls, marrow balls, custard cut in dice and quenelles, whose job was to give a clear soup something to chew. They turn up in mock turtle soup especially often, where the pale balls stood in for the turtle's eggs. By the time The Butterick Cook Book appeared in 1911, the household soup course was shrinking and canned bouillon was arriving, so these garnishes read as a survival of a more formal service: an inexpensive way to make a plain broth look composed.