Eggs are a weird food.
When they're scrambled or fried I can eat two, maybe three
but if you devil them I can finish off an entire platter and still not be
devilish indeed.
So I'm curious if I'm going to have the same reaction
to these deviled eggs from 15th century Germany.
So thank you to Hellofresh for sponsoring this video as we make medieval deviled eggs
this time on Tasting History.
So before we get into deviled eggs we need to answer the question what makes a deviled egg deviled?
Well in 1912 alongside a recipe for deviled eggs in a cookbook called 'The Chafing Dish' there appeared this definition
"Deviled dishes are those that are highly seasoned with condiments.
They are not considered wholesome as a regular diet,
but may be partaken of, on occasion, with advantage as well as pleasure."
Advantage as well as pleasure, hmm! Quite the snack.
Now other definitions talk about deviled being specifically related to something being hot.
That's the devil's temperature.
Specifically when that heat comes from cayenne pepper an ingredient surprisingly popular in 19th century cuisine,
but today deviled eggs don't usually tend to be that spicy so
I think that that definition from 1912 is more fitting,
and it also works with these stuffed eggs from medieval Germany.
"If you wish to make halved eggs that are stuffed, take eggs and boil them hard.
Slice down the middle. Remove the yolks from the whites. Grind them in a mortar.
When they are mashed, mix with raw eggs. Add sage and costmary, pepper and saffron.
And fill the whites with this. Then put them in butter and bake them well.
Take vinegar and other eggs. Make good sauce with this. Do add honey, pepper and saffron.
Salt to taste. And serve it forth."
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Now let's make some deviled eggs from pre-reformation Germany.
So first you need to hard boil six eggs.
"That's too expensive."
Bring a pot of water about an inch deep to a boil and gently add the eggs.
Reduce the heat to a gentle boil and let them cook for about 13 minutes.
Then remove them and put them in ice water for another 15 minutes
and that's really the hardest part of the recipe except for this next part which is the peeling.
Some are easy and some are more difficult.
And once you do peel them just be careful because these suckers are slippery.
One of them popped out of my hand and fell on the ground and kind of mashed
and so I couldn't use it anymore, so throughout the rest of this video instead of 12 halves you'll see 10.
So once you have your 12, or 10 halves, remove the yolks and then mash them in a bowl.
Then for the filling you'll need: one raw egg, a few leaves of sage, a few leaves of costmary or mint.
Unless you're growing costmary in your garden you'll probably have a hard time finding costmary at least here in the U.S.
so using mint is going to be the closest, easy thing that you can do.
Also kind of an interesting thing costmary used to also be called Bible leaf and that's because it was in the Bible,
literally. They would actually dry the leaves and then use them as bookmarks for Bibles
because the scent kept silverfish and book mites away.
And silverfish are the most disgusting thing in the entire world so I'm going to start growing costmary.
A quarter teaspoon of pepper and a small pinch of saffron diffused in a tablespoon of water.
So first add the raw egg to the hard-boiled egg yolks and mix until incorporated.
Then add in the herbs which should be minced and the pepper and the saffron in water,
and mix everything until it's nice and smooth.
Then you're going to fill the eggs with this and I have found that using a piping bag is the easiest way.
Now today you'd usually fill them until they're kind of heaping with the filling but since we are going to be frying these in butter
you can't really do that so you got to level it off.
So pour a quarter cup of melted butter into a pan and then set the eggs filling side down into the butter.
Now you can fry these on the stove but they burn really, really easily so I found that the easiest way
is to set the pan in the oven at 350 degrees Fahrenheit, 175 Celsius for about
five minutes then take the pan out,
flip over the eggs very, very gently and bake them for another five to seven minutes
or until the filling has become quite firm. And while they bake you can whip up your sauce.
For that what you'll need is: two tablespoons of white wine vinegar, one egg or two egg yolks.
So I tried making it both ways and it works both ways, but I am going to use just egg yolks because
my uncooked egg white allergy is not fun and that raises the question why am I making deviled eggs, and to that
I do not currently have an answer. -_-
One tablespoon of honey, a large pinch of pepper, a large pinch of salt and a pinch of saffron threads.
So just add the vinegar to the egg yolk or egg and then whisk,
and then add in the honey, pepper, salt and saffron threads and whisk everything together,
and then set that over a low heat for about five or six minutes.
You want this to thicken up a little bit but you don't want to scramble those eggs so do it very very slowly
just until it starts to thicken and then you can take it off.
And then while the eggs finish cooking let's go ahead and take a look at how the blessed hard-boiled egg
became so bedeviled. 3:)
"Ab ovo usque ad mala" literally from the eggs to the apples.
That was how the satirist Horace described an ancient Roman meal from beginning to end
just like we would today maybe say from soup to nuts, not that we ever finish a meal with an entire course of nuts
so it should really be like from soup to cookies but you get the idea.
See in ancient Rome it was from eggs to apples because the feast ended with apples or other fresh fruit
but it started with eggs, and that is where the history of the deviled egg begins.
In the ancient world's greatest surviving cookbook 'De re coquinaria' attributed to the gourmand Apicius
the author includes several recipes for egg dishes meant to be served at the beginning of a meal.
One is for a dish of boiled eggs served with a blend of honey, pepper, asafetida, wine, and liquamen or garum,
and he doesn't actually say that these eggs should be stuffed with all of this rather it's just the
eggs kind of cooked and mashed up or chopped up. He doesn't really say
and then this is more of a sauce that's put on top but it is a first step in the evolution of the deviled egg.
Though the next step doesn't take place for about a thousand years.
In 13th century Andalusia which at the time referred to most of the Iberian Peninsula under Islamic rule
an anonymous cookbook was written that gives a recipe for stuffed eggs it says to take hard-boiled eggs and then cut them in half
using a thread which one is brilliant and two I bet is really satisfying and I want to try that sometime.
Then the yolks are mixed with cilantro, onion juice, pepper, and a sauce called murrí which is a fermented sauce typically made with barley flour
but while the egg is stuffed and that stuffing is spiced
if it were to show up at the church potluck I don't think anyone would call it a deviled egg
because they would take the two halves and put them back together and then put like a toothpick
through them to hold it together so it would just look like a hard-boiled egg.
And that actually seems to be the norm throughout the Middle Ages as the Andalusian recipe spread across Europe.
Italy seems to be the first place that these eggs really took off because they appear in pretty much every early Italian cookbook
with the addition of some Italian flavors namely cheese.
Platina's 15th century recipe has you take the cooked egg yolk and then mix it
"with good cheese, aged as well as fresh, and raisins... likewise add parsley, marjoram and mint... along with some spices."
Again, the halves of these eggs are then put back together but then they are fried in butter similar to our recipe today.
Then they have a sauce that's made with cinnamon, and clove, and ginger, and
verjuice which is sour like our vinegar but is made from unripened grapes.
By the 17th century people were really leaning into the presentation of these eggs sometimes even taking egg whites
and kind of crumbling them up and then dyeing them pink using the new world ingredient cochineal.
The Spanish brought this from the New World back to Europe and then they marketed it as a seed that could be ground up,
and used as a dye for clothes or in this case egg whites,
but in reality it is not a seed but an insect that lives on the prickly pear cactus plant,
and I'd say this is why people stopped using it because it's an insect but people didn't stop using it.
In fact it's still often used today in many modern products.
You can actually still use it today as a natural dye for Easter eggs,
though while we do dye the outside ofeggs today the idea of dyeing the inside seems to have never really caught on,
but another presentation style from the period did and that is to leave the eggs open which is how most modern deviled eggs are made.
But these eggs would not have been called deviled because even when that term did start being applied
to food in the 18th century it wasn't applied to eggs
but rather a bunch of other dishes that were highly spiced.
Though the very first written mention of the word is irritatingly vague in exactly what dish it's talking about.
In the periodical 'The Lounger' published in Edinburgh in 1786
a writer is discussing his acquaintance who he considers to be
"a good bottle companion; that is, one who thinks none, talks little, and
and drinks a great deal."
In addition he knows how to decant a bottle of wine, never interrupts a good story,
and "can make punch, brew negus. And season a devil."
Now punch and negus are both drinks so it makes me wonder if
devil isn't referring to a drink here
but it's definitely not referring to an egg,
nor was it an egg that Washington Irving refers to in 1819 when he said
"Another holds a curry or a devil in utter abomination."
Who knew the man who wrote 'The Legend of Sleepy Hollow' hated curry,
I find that disappointing.
Now I've spoken before on some of the pitfalls that I have during the research process.
In fact I did a big long rant about it in the video on Leonardo da Vinci last summer.
Basically a fact gets repeated so many times and by reputable sources
that it becomes unquestioned even though it turns out it was never a fact to begin with.
Like the fact that many sources that I found claimed that the first mention of a specific deviled food
appeared when James Boswell published a biography of the famous writer Samuel Johnson.
These sources all claim that Boswell "...frequently refers to [Johnson] partaking of a dish of 'deviled bones' for supper."
But I have that biography, several editions of it, and nowhere does it mention deviled bones let alone frequently.
Even the Oxford English Dictionary has tried to find where in this work this exists,
and they couldn't find it. Seems like a really weird thing to make up right.
But it seems that a lot of stuff has actually been made up about deviled eggs or actually deviled foods in general.
The Underwood Company who has been making deviled ham since 1868 used to claim that
"Around 1868, Underwood's sons began experimenting with a new product
created from ground ham blended with special seasonings.
The process they dubbed "deviling", for cooking and preparing the ham, was new."
And while deviled ham was new the claim that they dubbed the process deviling is
poppycock, hogwash, and patently false.
Also can we go back a second to that part about deviled bones.
What the heck are deviled bones?
Turns out that they're kind of like an early version of buffalo wings.
In her cookbook Fannie Farmer had recipes for deviled almonds, deviled chestnuts, crabs, oysters, scallops,
and deviled bones.
And they are chicken drumsticks that are coated in flour and then fried,
and then topped with a sauce of cayenne pepper, and chili sauce, and Worcestershire,
and they sound really good if rather heartburn inducing.
Now deviled eggs do start to make appearances throughout the latter part of the 19th century but
they are not often stuffed like a modern deviled egg rather
they look more like the one from ancient Rome but
in 1877 in an Alabama newspaper there was a recipe termed deviled eggs,
and they are hard-boiled eggs that are sliced in half
then "Remove the yolks, and rub to a smooth paste with a little melted butter, a bit each of cayenne and mustard,
and a tablespoon of vinegar.
Fill the hollow whites with this and send to the table upon a bed of chopped white cabbage."
Another thing that it mentions is to cut off the bottom of the egg so that they don't wobble around meaning
that I guess the standard deviled egg tray just hadn't really caught on yet.
But other than that it seems that this is the beginning of deviled eggs as we know them and
this recipe was then published over and over in other newspapers around the U.S.
and so that became the standard recipe.
Over the years it changed a little bit throwing out butter and vinegar in favor of mayonnaise,
and for the most part cayenne was replaced with paprika.
These were often considered picnic foods especially in the South but they made the leap to pass around hors d'oeuvre
during the increase of the cocktail parties of Prohibition.
Nothing like some egg and paprika to cleanse the palate between bathtub gin martinis.
Now deviled eggs had become so popular that as Prohibition wound down and the Great Depression ramped up
first lady Eleanor Roosevelt featured them at a White House luncheon on March 21,1933
but as the menu was meant to demonstrate frugal Depression era cooking
the egg yolks were simply mashed with some diced onion and vinegar before being put back into the egg,
and then some thin tomato sauce was spread on top.
This was served alongside mashed potatoes and whole wheat bread.
And FDR who took his lunch in his office claimed it was
"good" though I'm thinking that was probably just a diplomatic answer so he didn't upset his wife.
Now deviled eggs kind of remained a picnic or Easter Sunday food for quite some time
but more recently you can go to a fancy restaurant and get a $20 deviled egg with caviar or candied prosciutto
which is actually really quite delicious. I've even had some that take a cue from the Medieval cooks
and the deviled egg is fried in butter just like the 15th century German eggs
that we're about to eat right now.
And here we are deviled eggs from Medieval Germany.
So despite my egg white allergy I think that these have been cooked enough that it's okay because for some reason
when I eat them cooked I'm fine, fully cooked so let's give it a shot,
and hope I don't die.
Hm!
So the flavor there is definitely that saffron. It just really packs a punch,
very little goes a long way.
There are other flavors there I'm kind of getting the herbs and everything
but the saffron carries the day and that's okay because I love saffron
but I do think that it's going to benefit from a bit of the sauce so
I'm going to take a bit of the sauce and put it on the egg,
and have another go.
Hmm!
More saffron!
So yeah it's it's definitely still the saffron is is the main dominant flavor but with the sauce you
get that kind of vinegar bite which is is very very welcome to kind of break up the creaminess
of the egg yolk and then you get a sweetness from the honey. In fact
I might even add a little bit more honey at the end because
it's really quite nice. There are some medieval recipes that just put sugar on top.
I don't know that I want to do that but the little bit of honey adds a sweetness and that is really nice.
That said I actually still prefer a modern paprika deviled egg
though put some candied prosciutto on there and and I am happy. :)
So eat some deviled eggs Medieval, modern, or ancient Roman and I will see you next time
on Tasting History.