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Salad Eggs
6 hard-cooked eggs 1 tablespoon butter 1 tablespoon cream 1/2 teaspoon mustard Pinch cayenne 1 teaspoon salt 1 tablespoon anchovy paste Lettuce or cress Garnish of radishes and small onions Remove the shells from the cold, hard-cooked eggs and cut a large piece from the top of each, take out the yolks and mix them to form a paste with butter, cream, mustard, cayenne, salt and anchovy paste. Put this mixture back into the hollows and lay the eggs on a dish of lettuce or cress. Garnish with radishes and small onions.
A stuffed-egg salad from the days before deviled eggs were halved lengthwise. The whole egg stands upright with a lid cut off, so the shape of the egg matters as much as the filling.
- Stand them upBecause the eggs are served whole rather than halved, they will roll. Trim a thin slice from the base of each so it sits flat, or nest each one into the greens with a small hollow pressed for it.
- Hard-cooked, not hard-boiledCover the eggs with water, bring to a bare simmer, then hold off the heat about 12 minutes and cool in cold water. A hard rolling boil gives you the grey-green ring and a rubbery white that will crack when you cut the top off.
- Anchovy pasteStill sold in tubes, and unchanged in character: very salty and strongly flavoured. One tablespoon into six yolks is assertive. Add the teaspoon of salt only after tasting, since the paste may supply enough on its own.
- MustardThe recipe says only "mustard"; dry mustard powder is the likelier reading for a 1929 American cookbook, though prepared mustard cannot be ruled out. Prepared mustard will work but is wetter and milder; use a scant teaspoon and hold back some of the cream.
- Cream and butterThe butter should be soft, not melted. The recipe does not say which cream, and in a 1929 kitchen unqualified "cream" could as easily be light as heavy. Sieve the yolks first, then work in the fat, and the paste comes out smooth rather than granular.
- Filling the shellsA teaspoon works, but a piping bag with a plain tip fills the narrow cavity more cleanly and lets you mound the mixture above the cut edge. Cap with the cut-off tops if you like the closed look.
- Small onionsProbably spring onions or small young onions, trimmed and used raw; the recipe does not specify, though a fresh garnish alongside radishes and greens reads more likely than pickled cocktail onions.
- YieldSix eggs serve six as a first course or salad plate, three or four as a light lunch. Make the filling up to a day ahead and stuff shortly before serving so the cut whites do not dry.
Stuffed eggs go back a long way before this book, but the framing here is of a piece with late-1920s American entertaining: the egg is treated as a salad component, set on a bed of greens with radishes and onions for colour, rather than passed as a picnic snack. Tubes and pots of anchovy essence and paste were a standard pantry item in Anglo-American kitchens from the nineteenth century onward, valued as a savoury shortcut. The New Delineator Recipes (1929) came out of the Butterick publishing house, whose Delineator magazine was a women's magazine covering fashion and homemaking, which may account for the specified garnish in a recipe that otherwise takes five minutes to assemble.