Deviled Eggs & Egg Salad: boring but a blank canvas for something bold or bright.

One of the basic American nibbles is the deviled egg. Generally it is a pretty bland item on the table of cold appetizers. So is it’s chopped up form, egg salad. You can shrug and ignore it, or you can put your imagination to work and make something out of it.

Basic Deviled Eggs: Boil six eggs, shell them, slice them in half and pop the yokes into a small bowl. Add to the yokes: a quarter cup of mayonnaise, a teaspoon of mustard, a grind or two of white pepper and a pinch of turmeric to hype the yellow color Mash and combine all the ingredients into a paste, put into a pastry bag or into a plastic storage bag, nip the corner of the bag and use it as an ad hoc pastry bag and squeeze the yoke mixture into the cavity left in the half eggs where the yoke used to be.


Photo from Wikipedia

While the above is good, it is also ordinary, even if you have used fresh free range organic eggs with a rich country taste instead of the bland hatchery laid eggs. Using the basic recipe you can take the eggs in a more interesting directions. Here are some ways to pep them up and give them some zip.

Cajun Eggs: Add fresh chopped chives and as much Tobasco Sauce as you want and substitute Creole or another whole grain mustard for the ordinary French’s Salad Mustard.

Green Herb Eggs: Chop up a couple shallots, two tablespoons of fresh parsley, a couple teaspoons of chopped chives and a a tea spoon of capers.

Sicilian Eggs: Add a tablespoon of capers, a table spoon of fresh basil, a teaspoon of lemon zest and a small dab of anchovy paste, mix and dust the stuffed with fine chopped parsley.

New York Eggs: Add a couple pieces of smoked salmon, a quarter teaspoon of chopped fresh dill, one chopped shallot, one teaspoon chopped chives and a quarter teaspoon of prepared horseradish.

Tarragon Eggs: Add a pinch of chopped tarragon, two table spoons of chopped French Cornichons, a quarter teaspoon of lemon zest.

Polish Eggs: Use sour cream instead of mayonnaise, add half a teaspoon of chopped dill, a quarter teaspoon of horseradish, a teaspoon of chopped parsley and a scant teaspoon of Russian style honey mustard.

French Eggs: Add a teaspoon of Dijon Mustard, two teaspoons of chervil if available parsley if not, white pepper and two teaspoons of chopped cornishons.

Yorkshire Eggs: Add a table spoon of Cross & Blackwell’s Chow Chow chopping up the pickle to small nubs, two teaspoons of fresh parsley. Unless you make your own private mustard pickles their is no substitute for Chow Chow.

The list can go on and on with your imagination and ingenuity the only limits.

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Anchovy Paste, the once & future seasoning.

Anchovy fillets on a Ceasar Salad. This and the other photos from Wikipedia.

Going through a forty year old LA Times cookbook of recipes from the restaurants of that time I was struck that anchovy paste was often used, not just to rev up salad dressings, but as a seasoning in many dishes and sauces. Today it is almost never mentioned except in family recipes from Italian American cooks like Rachel Ray or others coming from a southern Italian or Sicilian traditions.

This is really too bad because a tube of anchovy paste is handy, even a small can of anchovy fillets in olive oil is way too much for most dishes, unless you are making a bucket size Greek salad or an Italian one of roast peppers and other vegetables for a big party or barbecue.

A good quirt of it replaces salt in gravy and adds a rich bass note, not unlike Asian fish sauce. You don’t taste it, but you get a richer result, so you don’t have to tell people it’s in their plate. It is a very good substitute for salt in any dish that calls for it. It is especially good beef gravies.



A once common use of anchovy fillets in the British Isles, a snack called "Scotch Woodcock."

Historically until the Muslims seized north Africa in the eighth century, Roman and post Roman cooks added Garum, commonly translated as Fish Pickle, to almost everything, just like the Vietnamese, Chinese and other South East Asians. In Spain, Portugal, southern France and Italy anchovies came into use to replace the Garum that for some reason was no longer made on the shores of north Africa.
Bottles of Thai fish sauce.

The Chinese call it Fish Sauce, Nuc Mam in Vietnam, Bagoong or Pitis the Philippines. It is also used all the other Southeast Asian nations. During my year on the Mekong River during the Vietnam war I can attest that the most remarkable pungent awful smell that came from the riverside factories where fish was dried and then fermented into Nuc Mam. The smell was overpowering even if you were miles away. These drying and fermentation factories were always well away from any villages.

The joys & sorrows cooking: Memorable dishes & duds.

As most things, cooking is a mix of good, bad and occasionally wonderful experiences. Over the past few months I have been making soups, they are welcome when the weather is cold and they are very adaptable when the time of the dinner hour is not easy to predict.

There are more tricks and tweaks to making soups than I know and as often as not my efforts were disappointing. Some reasons for this are not understanding all the ingredients, not having the right stock or knowing how to finish or served the soup properly.

Two recent disappointments involved red lentils and pearl barley. In the first case I had no idea that red lentils are the most elastic and greedy legume. You soak them for a time before cooking and yet they seem to grow and absorb all the moisture in the pot. A small amount of lentils has an endless and insatiable thirst. Mo matter how much stock, water or wine I added to thin the pot of red lentil soup, the little beggars sucked it up. It was a tasty but very thick gruel of lentils and vegetables. Finally in desperation I called a friend from India where red lentils are much in use. He said dump a pint of whole milk yogurt into the pot. I did and end up with a very rich thick but at least more or less liquid result.

Another dud was attempt to make a very old fashion Scotch Broth. This soup, after the legendary Haggis, is Scotland's number two national dish. The name, Scotch Broth is ironic since it is a very thick and hearty soup, indeed almost a stew. Broth is very definitely something it doesn’t resemble at all. That is the Caledonian joke in the name. Now in this dish the ingredient that is critical is pearl barley. I remember that my grandmother often used it in her soups and so did a couple of the simple Italian American restaurants where we went on Sunday afternoon for two hour long dinners.
At the bottom of the soup bowl was a layer of soft chew round grains of pearl barley and they made the otherwise ordinary minestrone or vegetable soups richer and more interesting.

Now the trouble with this beloved ingredient is estimating the right amount of pearl barley to put in the soup. On my first attempt I followed the recipe and it clearly was not enough. It was so not enough that I poured in another batch of what the recipe called for. Well half an hour later the scotch broth became a gruel that would hardly allow the ladle to move it around. Oooooops.

This week I am going to try to make Hungarian “Hangover” soup which is, if I get it right, a very zippy bowl of paprika rich cabbage, sauerkraut, vegetables, sausages and chicken broth. This tangy soup is one of my favorites at a local Magyar bakery restaurant. I’ll let you know how it goes.

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