Stuffed Eggs
4 hard boiled eggs 1 tablespoon butter 1 tablespoon olive oil 1 teaspoon mustard Paprika Salt Chopped parsley Remove the shell, and cut the eggs in halves lengthwise. Carefully remove the yolks and rub them to a smooth paste with the butter, oil, mustard, parsley and seasoning. Fill the whites and serve with a white sauce, flavored with capers.
A plain deviled egg from a meatless-cookery collection, distinguished by the caper sauce that turns it from a picnic item into a lunch dish. The whole thing hinges on the hard-boiled eggs themselves.
- Boil the eggs gentlyLong, hard boiling gives the chalky yolk and green ring this filling has to fight. Bring them just to a boil, cover, take off the heat for 10-12 minutes, then chill in cold water so the shells slip off.
- Mustard means dry mustardMustard may well mean dry mustard -- a teaspoon of unqualified "mustard" in a book of this vintage is often dry mustard powder. If you use prepared mustard instead, a teaspoon will be milder and slightly wetter; adjust for taste and texture.
- Butter and oil togetherA tablespoon each is a great deal of fat for four yolks and the paste can break or turn greasy. Have the butter properly soft, mash the yolks dry first, then work in the fat gradually as you would for a mayonnaise.
- Paprika is listed but not usedPaprika is listed but not named in the method -- it may be folded into the "seasoning" of the paste, or dusted over the filled halves at the end, which is the usual treatment.
- The white sauceAssume a basic béchamel: 1 tablespoon butter, 1 tablespoon flour, 1 cup milk, cooked a few minutes to lose the raw flour taste, then a tablespoon or two of drained capers stirred in off the heat. Season carefully, as capers bring their own salt.
- ServingFour eggs give eight halves, which is a first course or light lunch for two rather than a party platter. Warm the sauce and pour it over or under the eggs on a hot dish.
- Scaling upThe ratios hold, but boil a spare egg or two for every half dozen so you have extra yolks to firm up the filling if it goes slack.
Stuffed or "deviled" eggs are very old — Roman cookery already served boiled eggs with piquant sauces, and stuffed eggs with the yolks mashed with seasonings and returned to the whites appear in medieval and early modern cookbooks well before the nineteenth century. Meatless cookery collections proliferated in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, driven partly by vegetarian and health reform movements and partly by Lenten and fast-day cooking. Eggs carried the protein load in such books, which is why they devote whole chapters to them. The caper sauce points to period fashion: capers in a white sauce were a standard accompaniment to boiled mutton and boiled fish in nineteenth-century English cooking, and here that sauce is borrowed and put to work without the meat.