Egg Salad
Cut hard-boiled eggs in half lengthwise, take out yolks, mix them with thick cream and flavor with onion juice, pepper, salt and tomato catsup, put the mixture back into the whites, garnish with crossed strips of anchovies. Serve with endive salad and French dressing.
A stuffed-egg plate under an older, broader sense of "salad" — the eggs are the centrepiece, the endive the accompaniment. Nothing here is difficult; the only real decisions are seasoning and texture.
- Onion juiceGrate a peeled onion on a fine rasp and use the liquid that collects, or press grated onion in a sieve. A quarter teaspoon per four yolks is plenty; it is meant to be a background note, not a flavour you can name.
- Thick creamThis means heavy or double cream, not sour cream and not the mayonnaise a modern deviled egg expects. Add it a teaspoon at a time — the yolks should hold a soft peak, not slump.
- Tomato catsupCatsup of the period, particularly homemade, was often thinner and more vinegary than the standard bottle today, though commercial brands were already thick and sweetened. Start with half a teaspoon for four eggs and taste, or the filling turns pink and candied.
- AnchoviesSalt-packed fillets need soaking and filleting; oil-packed tins can be blotted and cut into thin ribbons with scissors. Two crossed strips per half is the intended look, and they supply most of the salt — season the yolks lightly before adding them.
- Hard-boiled eggsFor whites that peel cleanly, cook 9 minutes and cool at once. A dull grey-green ring means they were held too long at a boil.
- French dressingIn this period that is oil, vinegar, salt and pepper whisked to order — roughly three parts oil to one of vinegar — not the sweet orange bottled dressing sold under the name in the United States now.
- YieldSix eggs gives twelve halves, enough for four as a first course or a light lunch plate. Fill the whites no more than an hour or two ahead and keep them covered and cold; the cream filling weeps if it stands.
"Salad" in American cookbooks of the early twentieth century covered almost any cold composed dish dressed with oil and vinegar or a cream mixture, which is why a plate of stuffed eggs can carry the name without any leaves in the recipe proper. Stuffed and seasoned eggs go back much further than that and appear in medieval and Renaissance European cookery, and the term "deviled," for food sharpened with mustard, pepper or anchovy, is generally traced to English usage of the late eighteenth century. The anchovy garnish and the onion juice suit a style of seasoning in which strong flavours were often added as an extracted juice or a thin strip rather than chopped through the dish.