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Egg Balls for Soup
Mrs. Frisbie.
Rub the yolks of three or four hard boiled eggs to a smooth paste, with a little melted butter, pepper and salt, to these add two raw ones, beat in light, add enough flour to hold the paste together, make into balls, with floured hands, and set in a cool place until just before your soup comes off, when you put them in carefully and boil one minute.
A forcemeat garnish rather than a dish in itself: small egg-yolk dumplings dropped into clear soup at the last moment. The whole thing hinges on the paste being stiff enough and cold enough to hold its shape in hot liquid.
- YieldThree or four yolks with two whole eggs will make a couple of dozen balls the size of a large marble, enough to garnish several bowls of soup. Made much larger they are unlikely to cook through in the time given.
- Egg sizeModern large and extra-large eggs may well be bigger than what this cook had; if the paste comes out slack, expect to need a little more flour.
- "Enough flour"Start with two tablespoons and add by the teaspoon until the paste stops sticking to a floured palm. It should feel like a firm choux dough; too much flour and the balls turn to pellets, too little and they dissolve.
- The cool place mattersChill the balls until the soup is ready; chilled paste holds together in liquid, while room-temperature paste slumps and clouds the soup.
- Simmer, do not boilA rolling boil breaks the balls apart. Drop them into soup at a bare simmer, despite the recipe's 'boil one minute.'
- Give them longer than a minuteOne minute sets the outside only, and there are raw eggs in the paste. Three to four minutes at a simmer cooks marble-sized balls through; they should be firm all the way to the centre when one is cut open.
- Butter'A little melted butter' is best read as very little; too much and the paste turns greasy and will not bind.
- ServingAdd them to the tureen or to individual bowls at the table. They toughen if held in hot soup, so make them the last thing before the soup goes out.
Egg balls were a common garnish in nineteenth-century American and English kitchens, and they are particularly associated with mock turtle soup, where they stood in for the green fat and eggs of a real turtle. The recipe's form here is typical of The Home Cook Book, compiled in Chicago in the 1870s from recipes contributed by named local women and often cited among the earliest American community charity cookbooks; the attribution to Mrs. Frisbie is the whole of its authority, and the vagueness about flour quantity is what you get when one experienced cook writes down a habit for another. The last line presumably assumes a range where a pot pulled off the hottest plate loses its boil quickly.