Deviled eggs and Semiquincentennial Celebrations
I’m guessing many semiquincentennial July 4th cookouts included deviled eggs. Ours did.
The recipe is my mother’s. Though she never wrote it out, I watched her enough to know to mix the egg yolks, mustard, mayonnaise, and sweet relish, then fill the hollowed-out egg whites.
Sometimes I switch dill relish for sweet relish and use Miracle Whip instead of mayo. Don’t tell Mother. She’d probably spin in her grave if she knew.
Our family cookouts in the past have included other family recipes, like Aunt Bick’s baked beans, homemade ice cream, and my mother-in-law’s chocolate cake [the one with the secret coffee ingredient that my father-in-law never knew about because he didn’t like coffee].
This year, the grill baton was passed to our grandson, a graduate of the Culinary Institute of America. The first thing he did was buy a much-needed new grill. Our hot dogs were perfectly cooked!
All the guests bought dishes to share. We had pasta salad, chicken salad, dips, and fruit salads, plus desserts galore. I, of course, brought Mother’s deviled eggs on my sister-in-law’s special egg plate, pictured above.
As we ate, we wondered how stuffed eggs came to be called deviled. Out popped the phones, and the race for the answer began.
The answer: By 1800, deviling became the verb to describe the process of making food spicy.
We also learned:
- Deviled eggs have been around since the first century in ancient Rome.
- The recipe was first compiled sometime between the fourth and fifth centuries A.D.
- By the 15th century, stuffed eggs had made their way across much of Europe.
- The popular egg hors d’oeuvres are also called “mimosa eggs,” “stuffed eggs,” “dressed eggs” or “salad eggs”—especially when served at church functions.
Why change the name for church potlucks, you ask? I’m guessing to avoid any association with Satan.
We also learned that most published recipes since the 1940s use mayonnaise, so Mother was right again. 😉
Deviled egg recipe variations include fresh dill, bacon, crabmeat, sriracha, kimchi, wasabi, and caviar. I am so happy that some of those extras were not in my mother’s recipe!
If you had stuffed eggs at your semiquincentennial celebration, did you call them angel eggs or deviled eggs?
