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M. a. T (Boil four eggs put into cold)
Boil four eggs; put into cold water; mash yolks with yolk of one raw egg, and one teaspoon of flour; pepper, salt and parsley; make into balls and boil two minutes.
This is a recipe for egg balls, the small forcemeat garnish dropped into mock turtle and other clear soups. The heading is a set of initials, the whole thing is one sentence, and almost everything but the ingredients is left to the cook.
- What it is forEgg balls are a garnish, not a dish. They go into a clear or lightly thickened soup at the moment of serving. Four cooked yolks plus a raw one will make only a small number of little balls.
- "Put into cold water"This means plunging the boiled eggs into cold water to stop the cooking and loosen the shells, not boiling them from cold. Boil them hard, about ten minutes, so the yolks are dry and crumbly enough to mash.
- The hinge: keep them small and the water gentleSmall balls will set through in two minutes where larger ones may not, and a hard boil risks breaking them. Roll them small and lower them into water or broth kept below a rolling boil.
- The raw yolkOne raw yolk and a teaspoon of flour are the entire binder. If the mixture will not hold, add flour a pinch at a time rather than more egg, which makes the balls rubbery.
- Two minutes is rightThis timing does not need lengthening. The balls are small and the yolks already cooked; the simmer only needs to set the binder.
- SeasoningPepper, salt and parsley are the whole of it. Chop the parsley very fine or it will keep the balls from rolling smooth. Nutmeg or lemon zest appears in some other versions of the same garnish.
- Cook them in the soup or in waterPoaching in salted water keeps the soup clear; poaching in the soup itself gives a little more flavour but clouds a consommé with flour.
Egg balls belong to the nineteenth-century vocabulary of soup garnishes, alongside forcemeat balls, quenelles and croutons, and they appear most often in recipes for mock turtle soup, where they stood in for the turtle's eggs. Real turtle soup was a luxury dish, and the egg-yolk balls were a frank imitation of a prized part of the animal. Many American and British cookbooks of the period list them without explanation.