Deviled Eggs: Historical Food Fortnightly Challenge #15

 For background on the Historical Food Fortnightly, click here.

The Challenge: Sacred or Profane December 14 - December 27
In this challenge, be as divine or as devious as you like! It could be a food with connections to a religion, a dish served for sacred celebrations, or a concoction with a not-so-polite name. Whatever your choice, show us how naughty and/or nice you can be!

Deviled Eggs!

I haven't been on the challenge bandwagon since my parents came to visit us in Peru toward the end of November...two weeks of fun followed by a couple weeks of recovery and then Christmas meant not much extra time. But, I thought of deviled eggs as a fun Christmas treat and set out to find a historical recipe. Bonus was that I found one that didn't require mayonnaise (we never use it, so if I need it for a recipe it's an extra expense/hassle) and it had an interesting twist.

The Recipe: Deviled Eggs, Many Ways for Cooking Eggs, Sarah Rorer, [1907] (p. 51)

The Date/Year and Region: Recipe is English, published 1907 in Philadelphia.

How Did You Make It: I decided to follow her instructions for how to hard boil the eggs.  I first warmed water until it was warm but comfortable to the touch, then added the eggs.  I then heated the water to a boil by turning up the burner heat and when the water started to boil, I turned off the heat and left it for 20 minutes.  I then put the eggs into cool tap water, removed the shells after a period of time and cut the hard boiled eggs in half.  At this point, I followed the deviled egg instructions exactly except for making an additional sauce or rolling them in tissue paper fringed on the edges.  I decided that was too much work on Christmas and I'm don't have a lot of extra tissue paper here in Peru.

Time to Complete: Approximately 1 hour from start to finish.  Some of the time was passive time waiting for the eggs to boil, set, and cool.  I did use some of that time to chop the chicken (which was previously cooked so all I had to do was measure it out) and measure out my salt and pepper.

Total Cost: Approximately $5.25 USD (Eggs: 12 soles (approx. $4 at today's exchange rates), chicken maybe 2 soles or 70 cents? butter approx 50 cents, salt and pepper from pantry.)

How Successful Was It?: I thought these were delicious and judging by the rate at which we consumed the whole batch, the rest of the family thought so, too.  I would be interested in making these again with a little mustard for kick.  The chicken adds a very interesting yet delicious flavor.

How Accurate Is It?: I used all modern equipment (including a lime press instead of a sieve) but I think the end result was quite accurate.

Time to Research:  I got the idea for deviled eggs, spent a few minutes looking online for historical cookbooks and figured that a cookbook called Many Ways for Cooking Eggs had better have such a recipe.  It did.  15 minutes tops.

Our from the farm eggs

Adding them to prewarmed water per instructions

Letting the butter melt and then mixing in the salt and pepper.  I put it on top of the eggs as they cooked.

Chopped chicken with the butter, salt and pepper rubbed in, along with the eggs.

A lime squeezer was the closest thing to a sieve I had available.  I then mushed the egg yolks with the chicken.

The finished product.  There was surprisingly little extra filling- I could easily have made it work out exactly.