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Stuffed Eggs
The following is a very fine recipe for stuffed eggs: Boil six eggs very hard, remove the shells, cut the eggs in two . 28 crosswise, and slice off a piece from the round end of each half so it will stand firmly. Remove the yolks, mix with them a little chopped ham, and fill the cavities in the whites with this mixture, heaping it in cone fashion. Arrange the little filled "cups" on a flat dish, and pour about them a dressing made by the following recipe, which will be sufficient for eight "cups": Two eggs (yolks); one-half teaspoon of mustard; one-half teaspoon of salt; two tablespoons of vinegar; twelve tablespoons of salad oil. Beat the yolks light, and stir into them the salt and the mustard. Then add the salad oil very slowly; and as the mixture thickens, thin it with the vinegar.
A straightforward deviled egg with a hand-beaten mayonnaise poured around it. The dressing is the part that needs attention: twelve tablespoons of oil into two yolks is a real emulsion, and it breaks if you rush.
- Add the oil drop by drop at firstTwo yolks will carry three-quarters of a cup of oil, but only if the first two or three tablespoons go in almost drop by drop while you beat constantly. Once the mixture has visibly thickened you can pour in a thin steady stream. If it splits, start a fresh yolk in a clean bowl and beat the broken sauce into it slowly.
- Raw yolks in the dressingThe dressing is never cooked. Use pasteurized eggs, or a commercial mayonnaise thinned with a little vinegar and mustard, if you are serving anyone pregnant, elderly, very young or immune-compromised. Keep the finished dish refrigerated and serve within a few hours.
- Salad oilAt the time this generally meant olive oil, and in America increasingly cottonseed oil. A mild olive oil or a neutral oil both work; strong extra-virgin olive oil can turn bitter when beaten hard in a mayonnaise.
- MustardAlmost certainly dry mustard powder rather than prepared mustard, though the recipe does not specify. It is there partly for flavor and partly as an emulsifier, so do not leave it out.
- Boiling the eggs"Very hard" implies cooking well past set, which is what produces the gray-green ring around the yolk. Twelve minutes in water brought just below a simmer, then straight into ice water, gives firm yolks that mash smoothly and whites that are easier to peel.
- The ham"A little chopped ham" is vague; about two ounces of finely minced cooked ham to six yolks is a good ratio. The yolks alone are dry, so add a spoonful of the dressing to the filling to bind it before piping or heaping it in.
- Cutting crosswiseHalving the eggs across rather than lengthwise, then trimming the round end flat, is what makes them stand as cups. Trim only a thin slice or the filling leaks out the bottom.
- YieldSix eggs give twelve halves; the dressing is specified for eight, so expect leftover mayonnaise or scale the dressing up by half. Serves four to six as a first course or part of a cold table.
Stuffed or "deviled" eggs are far older than this book — filled halved eggs appear in Roman and medieval European cookery — but the version here belongs squarely to the late-Victorian and Edwardian cold table, where a dish of eggs napped in mayonnaise sat alongside salads and cold meats at luncheon or supper. The Butterick Publishing Company, better known for dress patterns, issued its cook book to the same middle-class household audience it sold sewing patterns to, and the assumption that a cook would beat up three-quarters of a cup of mayonnaise by hand as a matter of course tells you a good deal about kitchen labor in turn-of-the-century America. Commercially bottled mayonnaise was not yet an established retail product in this period; the emulsion was still something made fresh in a bowl, and the ability to make one that did not break was a mark of a competent cook.