Mystery Balls

The culinary atrocity you see before is not vomit shaped into a brick and beautifully garnished, it is in fact my next retro food experiment, the Ham and Cheese Loaf. However, I haven't quite got that far. Since in this instance I have a picture to go by I wanted to garnish it as close to the way it's garnished here. This led to my current dilemma.


As you can see, there seems to be lettuce in the front and back of the loaf, and then on each side we have slice of tomato, with a sprig of parsley, and....what? What is that? What is that slimy white ball on top of that tomato? Upon closer examination, my first theory was that they were pearl onions. This theory was shot down by a random 80-year-old woman I was bothering in the grocery store yesterday, who told me there was no way that those were pearl onions. She seemed quite adamant about that, although what she thought they were instead she wasn't so clear on.
"Perhaps they're hard-boiled egg halves."

Yeah, maybe hard-boiled quail eggs, because chicken eggs don't come that small. So much for the pearl onion theory. The next person I asked was the older woman who worked at the grocery deli, and she didn't know either, but her guess was yellow cherry tomatoes. I didn't think that they would be that shiny, and why would you garnish tomatoes with smaller tomatoes?

I got a more likely theory from the gal at Peet's coffee, who said it had to be balls of mayonnaise. Of course! They're shiny like mayonnaise and would be the right color. But how did they get the mayonnaise into such perfect round balls? Coffee girl suggested they used a melon-baller, but I would think the mayonnaise would just partially stick to the melon-baller and just plop a mess onto the tomato. Hmmm....

Using my great technological skills I was able to zoom in and produce this image, clearly showing and indicating the white balls in question. Are they perfectly sculpted balls of mayonnaise? Are they tomatoes garnished with smaller tomatoes? Are they tiny alien life-forms that attach themselves to garnishes to feed on their unsuspecting victims??

The next question that I'm usually asked when I interrupt a random stranger's day to ask them about garnish is, "Well, what does it say in the recipe?" Do people really believe that I would go to all the effort of asking a total stranger their opinion on the matter if it clearly said in the recipe what they were? All the recipe says is 'unmold on salad greens and serve with salad dressing,' which I believe translates to, "dump on lettuce and serve with mayonnaise.' That supports the mayonnaise theory.

With any luck Michal and I will be attempting to make the Ham and Cheese Loaf soon, but until then does anybody else have any theories about what those slimy white balls might be?