Home › Recipes › Devilled Eggs
Devilled Eggs
Remove the shells from hardboiled eggs, cut in halves and remove the yolks. Work into the yolks sufficient Pompeian Olive Oil, lemon juice and a little dry mustard to form a smooth paste. Season with Cayenne pepper and a little salt, and return to the whites. Serve on lettuce leaves.
All salads are enriched and improved by imported Pompeian Olive Oil.
A short advertising-pamphlet recipe with no quantities at all, so the proportions are left to the cook. The oil-and-lemon binding is the point of difference from the mayonnaise version most people know.
- Working proportionsFor six eggs (twelve halves), start with about 3 tablespoons olive oil, 1 tablespoon lemon juice, 1 teaspoon dry mustard, a scant 1/2 teaspoon salt and a pinch of cayenne. Add the oil slowly and taste as you go; yolks vary in how much they will absorb.
- The hinge: add the oil in a trickleMashed yolks will take up a good deal of oil if it goes in gradually and the mixture is worked smooth between additions. Added all at once it tends to pool and the filling turns greasy rather than creamy.
- This is not a mayonnaise fillingOil, lemon and mustard give a looser, sharper, more olive-forward result than a mayonnaise-bound devilled egg, which was already known by this date and later became the default. Use a good fruity extra-virgin oil, since almost all the flavour comes from it.
- Dry mustard needs a momentMustard powder develops its heat once wet. Mix it with the lemon juice first and leave it two or three minutes before combining with the yolks, or the pungency will keep building after you have judged the seasoning.
- Hard-boiled, not hard-cooked to deathTwelve minutes in barely simmering water, then straight into cold water, gives fully set yolks without the grey-green ring and sulphurous edge that comes from a hard boil. Older eggs peel more cleanly than very fresh ones.
- Filling the whitesA piping bag or a zip bag with a corner cut off is neater than the spoon the original implies. If a half wobbles on the lettuce, trim a thin slice from the bottom of the white.
- Yield and servingSix eggs make twelve halves, enough as a salad course for four to six. Assemble no more than an hour or two ahead and keep refrigerated; the lemon and mustard dull quickly once the filling sits.
"Devilled" entered English cookery around the turn of the nineteenth century to mean food made hot with mustard, cayenne or pepper — devilled kidneys, devilled biscuits, devilled bones — and the halved stuffed egg picked up the name once the filling was spiced rather than plain. The dish itself is much older than the word: Renaissance cookery stuffed boiled egg halves with the mashed yolks, and the technique travelled through European household books for centuries. What dates this particular version is the context. Pompeian Olive Oil was an imported-oil brand promoted in the United States in the early twentieth century, and booklets like this one were given away to persuade American cooks that olive oil belonged in everyday salads rather than only in the medicine chest — hence the closing sales line, and hence a devilled egg bound with oil and lemon instead of the mayonnaise that would later dominate the recipe.