Egg Salad
Six eggs, one head of lettuce or parsley, mayonnaise or cooked dressing. Place the eggs in a sauce pan of boiling water, and let them stand where they will keep hot, but not boiling, for thirty minutes. Leave them in cold water for three minutes, take off the shells, and cut the eggs in halves. Remove the yolks and mash them until fine. Add to them enough of the salad dressing to moisten, and heap the mixture in the halved whites. Put the remainder of the dressing in the bottom of the salad dish, cover with lettuce or parsley and place the eggs on the leaves.
This is deviled eggs served on a bed of greens, and the only technical instruction that matters is the egg cooking. The thirty-minute hold in water kept below a simmer is not a mistake or an excess of caution.
- The hinge: hot, never boiling waterWater held below a simmer cooks the white to a tender set and the yolk to a crumbly, even yellow, avoiding the rubbery texture and grey-green ring that hard boiling produces. Bring the water to a boil, add the eggs, and keep the covered pan somewhere warm enough that the water stays hot without bubbling for the thirty minutes; on a cold hob the water will cool a good deal, so check that it is still hot to the touch. A ten-minute rolling boil is faster but gives a coarser result.
- Three minutes in cold waterLong enough to stop the carryover cooking and loosen the membrane for peeling, not long enough to chill the eggs through. If you want them fully cold for a summer table, leave them longer and dry them before peeling.
- Cooked dressingThe alternative to mayonnaise here is boiled dressing: egg yolks, vinegar, mustard, a little sugar and flour or butter, thickened over hot water. It is tangier than mayonnaise and, depending on the thickener, often looser. Any modern boiled or cooked salad dressing stands in.
- Mayonnaise and raw eggHomemade mayonnaise contains uncooked yolk. Use pasteurised eggs if the salad will sit out, or if serving anyone pregnant, elderly or immunocompromised. Commercial mayonnaise is made with pasteurised egg and is not a concern.
- Mash the yolks properlyThe recipe wants them fine. A fine sieve gives a smoother result than a fork, which tends to leave the yolks a little grainy.
- Dressing under the leavesThe dressing goes in the bottom of the dish, the greens over it, the stuffed halves on top. Nothing is tossed, so use only enough to pool.
- YieldTwelve halves, which serves six as a first course or four as a light lunch. Season the yolk mixture with salt and a little mustard or paprika before filling; the original assumes the dressing carries all the seasoning.
Stuffed eggs are far older than this book: Roman cookery served eggs with sharp sauces, and by the medieval period European kitchens were mixing yolks with spices and returning them to the whites. What dates this version to the turn of the twentieth century is the framing as a *salad* rather than a relish or savoury, and the choice offered between mayonnaise and "cooked dressing." Cold composed dishes became a genre of their own in American publishing from the 1890s onward, alongside the newly fashionable luncheon course. The gentle sub-boiling method for eggs was standard advice in domestic-science teaching of the period, often attributed to Fannie Farmer and her contemporaries on the grounds that fiercely boiled egg white was toughened and harder to digest.