THE DEVILED EGG GETS ITS DUE
For those who don’t despise it, endless variations abound
My daughter’s eyes widened as the mayonnaise, mustard, cider vinegar, salt, Worcestershire sauce and egg yolks were forked together into a zippy yellow paste. Her finger went toward the bowl, so I stabbed at it with the fork.
“Not yet,” I said. “We savor the sublime.” “You’re being too serious. This takes too long,” she protested.
I told her she was welcome to enjoy a hardboiled egg, but at that point a hard-boiled egg was 15 minutes away because the dozen I’d boiled had been deconstructed so severely that the only options were waiting or nothing. Like many great things, deviled eggs require a little patience.
We didn’t trouble ourselves with a piping bag to create aesthetically pleasing little grooves of viscous egg filling. We instead spooned the filling into the jittery white cups and ate three halves apiece in less time than it takes to check the mail.
My wife had gone upstairs and locked the door. “The upstairs is on a separate HVAC unit,” she informed us. “You stay down there with that …”
I cannot print the rest of her description. A few hours later, after the shells had been taken outside, after the countertop had been wiped down, after the remaining eggs had been snapped safely inside a plastic container, she returned downstairs. She posted a photo of the offending food and the response on Facebook was truly American for our current moment in history. Nobody, it appeared, felt indifferently about deviled eggs.
This disparity set me to wondering about this strange and tantalizing food.
Multiple sources suggest our ancestors pilfered nesting sites for eggs in the Neolithic
Age. This speaks poorly of us, as it took some 6,500 years of eggs rolling off rocks and spattering in the dirt before we came up with the wheel. Nevertheless, with practice, stealing an egg proved easier than fighting a mammal to the death. Boiling proved a more complicated process, one documented in fascinating detail earlier this year by the Atlantic.
Several sources including the History Channel suggest the Romans of the 4th and 5th century were adding a little spicy flair to their boiled eggs. History.com’s Laura Schumm wrote that yolks were pulverized into a paste and reinserted into the egg whites in the 13th century, then reassembled into a stuffed egg. She thinks the first culinary use of “devil” was in Great Britain in 1786, to indicate an added spiciness. The introduction of mass-produced mayonnaise in the 20th century gave us this food we love. And hate.
I’d give up all other food before eggs. I will eat them in any form at any time of day. These little protein bombs bear a muted but noticeable flavor profile, yet they’re also blank enough to serve as a canvas for what you paint onto them: shallots, cheeses, relishes, salt and so on. I knew people who didn’t care for them as I did. But I wasn’t aware the resistance was so full of fervor.
Food historian Sarah Wassberg Johnson suggested the odor is a major turnoff for many. What she called “a sensitivity to the sulfurous smell of overcooked eggs.
“The whites contain hydrogen and sulfur, and the yolks contain iron, and when overcooked, these three elements combine to create hydrogen sulfide, which smells like rotten eggs or human bodily functions.”
Wassberg Johnson also suggested that many people experience deviled eggs in less-than-optimum conditions: left out at room temperature or worse, at picnics.
I played little-league baseball in a fairly small town in eastern Kentucky, so I was fully aware of how this dish was capable of being presented poorly: overcooked eggs, watery filling pooling with paprika and hours spent on a picnic table, attracting more flies than people. But I still remember them fondly. My bridge too far with deviled eggs was further down river. I remember it specifically from a decade ago: a filling station outside Austin. I needed a latenight dinner and decided a paper plate bearing Saran Wrapped eggs — the yolks gently stained yellow by the filling and time — was a decision I’d regret.
But more often than not, I adore this strange food for its variety. One of my favorites can be found in Austin at Lucy’s Fried
Chicken. Chef James Holmes had always served deviled eggs at brunch at Olivia, his fine-dining restaurant. He wondered how far he could push the dish.
“I wondered what would happen if I fried one,” he says. “So I fried one up and sent it out. And it went over.”
The fried deviled eggs have become a staple at his chicken restaurant. And he proudly cites a moment at the South by Southwest Music Festival a few years ago: Latenight-TV host Jimmy Kimmel had Willie Nelson sing an Austin-centric update of “To All the Girls I’ve Loved Before.”
“So there are all these Austin references, Matthew McConaughey,” Holmes says. “And then there’s one about getting high and eating deepfried deviled eggs. That was the best endorsement we could get.”
His affinity goes back to his restaurant’s namesake: His grandmother Lucy, who lived in Abilene, would make fried chicken and deviled eggs on Sundays and for funerals in her community.
Holmes’ permutation is extreme. And he cites some other favorites, such as Lamberts, where they’re topped with an anchovy. He’s found caviar adds a nice “saltiness and pop,” and mustard seeds can do the same.
Houston Chronicle food critic Alison Cook recalls a paperback copy of a James Beard cookbook she owned in college in which the famed food writer had “maybe two dozen variations.”
Based on the pile of plastic, spiral-bound cookbooks in my own home, I found the rudiments don’t change much for basic deviled eggs. But the possibilities are boundless.
I found recipes in these small-town cookbooks — books with contributors whose names included Punkin, Puddin’ and Pooter — and found the permutations nearly prohibitive. To test them all would surely congeal my blood to a yellowed ooze.
Yet I remained intrigued. For our first batch, I roughly followed a recipe from America’s Test Kitchen that used cider vinegar and Worcestershire for the pop.
Others relied on Tabasco, bottled Caesar dressing, sardines, lemon juice, minced onion, chipotle powder, horseradish, sliced jalapeños and olives for snazziness. I found a recipe that suggested a nice “shrimp sauce” accompaniment.
When I mentioned this to my wife, she wordlessly walked back upstairs and locked the door again. Another of these cookbooks included a recipe for “smoky egg dip,” which is a phrase I’ll forever use to torment my egg-disinclined friends.
The “Cotton County Cooking” cookbook sprinkled Parmesan cheese on top before sending the eggs under the broiler. It included the helpful tip: “Don’t talk on the telephone while these are under the broiler.”
So you’ve been warned.
Though these variations on a theme offered great variety that proved intriguing to two-thirds of my family, they didn’t offer much in the way of explanation about a nation divided like a hardboiled egg. The website PopSugar posted a poll about a decade ago that found about 56 per cent loved deviled eggs, while 36 percent hated them. The 8 percent listed as undecided are not represented in my life, judging by a poll of my friends.
My friend Lory suggested it’s akin to cilantro: “You love it or hate it.” Her family falls into the love-it camp.
Naturally, many people base their opinion on the filling. One friend, Paul, says it “must be piquant — don’t skimp on the mustard, vinegar, black pepper or especially the paprika.” He advocates against getting too fussy with “bacon, shrimp, caviar, etc.”
There are strong opinions about the mayo used. Duke’s Mayonnaise bills itself as “the secret to great food,” and it has a following of advocates including my friend Catherine, who cite its “whipped and airy” qualities.
My friend Bobby is an advocate for the right texture: “simultaneously airy and whipped while still feeling substantial and hearty.” Done right, he says, the food “almost feels decadent.”
He was born and raised in New York, which undercuts the argument that deviled egg affinity breaks cleanly among regional lines. That said, Houston Blues Society president Kristen Egan calls deviled eggs “one of my family’s staples.” Her husband, musician John Egan, grew up on the East
Coast. She brought a batch of deviled eggs to a family gathering, “and literally no one ate them.”
My friend and colleague Diane grew up in Indiana hating deviled eggs but was won over by those made by her husband’s grandmother, which acquired just a bit of bite from pickle juice and garlic.
Similarly, Wassberg Johnson says she didn’t like deviled eggs as a child, but today she attributes that to under-salting and overcooking. She’s found her own sweet spot with deviled eggs that she associates more with home eating than company picnics. She describes the food as “more like eating a portable bitesized egg salad than most people’s deviled eggs.”