Home › Salads › Stuffed Egg Salad
Stuffed Egg Salad
Cut into tiny dice sufficient cold meat, veal, chicken or turkey preferred, to measure one heaping cupful; put in a bowl one-half of a teaspoonful of salt, one quarter of a teaspoonful of white pepper and three tablespoonfuls of olive oil, and stir until the seasonings are dissolved; then add a few drops at a time, one tablespoonful of tarragon vinegar and stir until the mixture is slightly thickened and of a grayish color; mix this thoroughly with the prepared meat and put aside for an hour or two. Hard boil six eggs, shell them and cut them into halves crosswise, remove the yolks and put aside; to the meat add one-half of the dressing, fill each white cup heaping full of the mixture. Prepare a number of cups with blanched lettuce leaves, put in each a teaspoonful of the salad, on it stand the filled egg cup, and sprinkle over a little chopped parsley. For the dressing, rub three of the boiled yolks to a smooth paste, with one tablespoonful of olive oil, add a quarter of a teaspoonful of salt, a dash of cayenne and an eighth of a teaspoonful of dry mustard; work in gradually three tablespoonfuls of olive oil. The mixture should now be very thick. Add one teaspoonful of lemon juice.
A cold-meat salad packed into hard-boiled egg-white cups, dressed twice: once with a plain oil-and-vinegar seasoning and again with a cooked-yolk mayonnaise. The recipe reads out of order, so read it through before starting.
- Work in this orderBoil and halve the eggs first, since the dressing needs three of the yolks. Then make the yolk dressing, then the vinaigrette and meat, which wants an hour or two to sit.
- The hinge is the emulsionThe vinegar goes into the first dressing a few drops at a time, and the oil into the yolk dressing gradually. The vinaigrette should thicken and go, as the recipe puts it, a grayish colour; the yolk dressing should be very thick before the lemon juice goes in.
- Blanched lettuce leavesHere "blanched" means the pale inner leaves of a head of lettuce, not leaves dipped in boiling water. Use the cupped hearts of romaine or butter lettuce.
- Egg cups that standCutting crosswise gives two shallow cups that tip easily. Trim a flat base off the rounded end, or set each on its spoonful of dressing to steady it.
- Tarragon vinegarStill sold, or steep a bruised tarragon sprig in white wine vinegar for a few days. Plain white wine vinegar works, with a pinch of dried tarragon in the salt.
- White pepperCalled for so the pale dressing stays unspeckled. Black pepper will show as flecks and tastes noticeably different, so the swap is not purely cosmetic.
- Cold meatA heaping cup of diced cooked meat is roughly 5 to 6 oz. Dice it small, about a quarter inch, or the cups will not fill neatly. Poached chicken thigh has more flavor than breast.
- Yield and leftoversTwelve filled halves, so four to six as a first course. Half the yolk dressing goes into the meat; the recipe does not say what becomes of the other half. The three unused yolks are yours to deal with.
- Keep it coldFilled eggs sitting in mayonnaise want refrigeration until served, and should not stand out on a buffet for more than a couple of hours.
Stuffed and deviled eggs were a fixture of late nineteenth-century American entertaining, and this one belongs to the era when "salad" meant a composed, plated construction rather than a bowl of leaves. The double dressing is a pattern often found in the cookbooks of the 1890s and 1900s: a French dressing to marinate and season the solid ingredients, then a mayonnaise to bind and coat. That the mayonnaise here is built on cooked yolks rather than raw ones is worth noticing, since it puts to use some of what removing the stuffing leaves behind, and it is thickened by nothing more than hard yolk and a great deal of olive oil worked in slowly. The recipe also reflects the period's frank interest in leftovers: cold veal, chicken or turkey from the roast, diced fine enough that a cupful stretched to feed a table.