Deviled Egg Day

What the day is

Deviled Egg Day is observed on November 2. The dish is a hard-boiled egg halved, the yolk mashed with something rich and something sharp, and piped or spooned back into the white.

Origin and background

Stuffed eggs are ancient. Roman cookery included boiled eggs seasoned and served as a first course, and versions appear across medieval and early modern European cooking long before anyone called them deviled.

The term deviled is culinary rather than diabolical. It emerged in eighteenth-century Britain to describe food seasoned aggressively, usually with mustard, pepper or cayenne, and it attached to kidneys, ham and eggs alike. The devil in the name refers to heat, not to the filling.

Regional naming still varies. In parts of the American South and in church cookbooks they are sometimes called stuffed eggs or salad eggs, a wording preferred by people uneasy with the devil reference.

The technical difficulties are entirely in the boiling. A gray-green ring around the yolk is iron and sulfur compounds reacting under prolonged heat, harmless but unappealing, and avoided by not overcooking and by cooling quickly. Peeling trouble is largely about freshness: very fresh eggs have a lower pH and cling to their membranes, so eggs a week or two old peel far more cleanly, which is the opposite of what most people assume.

How to take part

• Use eggs that are not fresh. A week or ten days old peels cleanly; yesterday's will tear.
• Lower them into already-boiling water rather than starting cold, then cool immediately in ice water.
• Push the yolks through a sieve rather than mashing them. It is the difference between smooth and grainy.
• Balance fat with acid: mayonnaise needs mustard, vinegar or pickle brine behind it.
• Pipe rather than spoon if appearance matters; a freezer bag with a corner cut off works.
• Assemble close to serving and keep them cold, since egg and mayonnaise do not sit well at room temperature.