Home › Salads and Salad Dressings › Deviled Eggs
Deviled Eggs
Cut hard-cooked eggs crosswise or lengthwise, remove yolks, mix with vinegar and seasoning, or with boiled dressing. Refill yolks in the whites. Cold minced ham or chicken may be added to the yolks. French dressing may be used instead of vinegar.
A method rather than a formula — the book assumes you know how to hard-cook an egg and can season by taste. A few things are worth pinning down.
- Hard-cooked, not hard-boiledCover the eggs with cold water, bring just to a boil, then cover and hold off the heat 10-12 minutes before plunging into cold water. A rolling boil is what produces the grey-green ring and the rubbery white.
- Proportions the book omitsFor six eggs, figure about 2 tablespoons of dressing or 1 tablespoon of vinegar plus 2 tablespoons softened butter or mayonnaise, 1/2 teaspoon salt, and mustard and pepper to taste. Add liquid a little at a time; the yolks take less than you expect before the filling slumps.
- "Boiled dressing"This is the period's cooked dressing — egg yolks, vinegar, mustard, a little flour or cornstarch and milk, thickened over water. It was standard in American cookbooks before commercial mayonnaise became universal. Mayonnaise substitutes directly.
- "Deviled" means seasoned sharplyThe heat is meant to come from dry mustard, cayenne or paprika. Vinegar alone gives a tart, rather flat filling; add at least a pinch of mustard if you want the name to mean anything.
- French dressing then and nowIn this period the term meant simply oil, vinegar, salt and pepper shaken together — not the sweet orange bottled dressing sold under the name today. Use a plain vinaigrette, and rather less of it than the vinegar version since the oil loosens the yolks quickly.
- Refilling neatlySieve the yolks before mixing and pipe or spoon the filling back in mounded high. Cutting lengthwise gives the familiar boat; crosswise gives an upright cup that needs a thin slice off the base to stand.
- Ham or chicken additionMince finely and keep it to about a third the volume of the yolks, or the filling will not bind. Salt lightly if the ham is cured.
- Yield and holdingSix eggs give twelve halves, enough for four as a salad course. Made ahead, they should be covered and refrigerated, and eaten within a day — filled eggs weep and dull quickly.
Deviling — pounding a cooked food with mustard, pepper and vinegar and serving it as a piquant relish — was an English kitchen habit generally traced to around the turn of the nineteenth century, applied to bones, kidneys, crab and, inevitably, eggs. The recipe names two dressings, boiled and French, without explaining either. The style is compressed — a technique in four sentences, on the assumption that the reader's mother had taught her the rest.