the favorite receipt and business directory Archives

Deviled Eggs 3 Ways

June 21, 2018January 12, 2019

“The Baltimore Sun rises to remark that its idea of a ‘sane Fourth [of July]’ is ‘oodles of fried chicken, deviled eggs and chocolate ice cream. It may be all right for the Fourth, but it does not argue well for a comfortable fifth.” – Racine Journal, WI, July 4, 1911

For a while now I’ve been wanting to do a post where I compared some of the many deviled egg recipes in my collection. This post is hopefully part one of at least two.

When I pulled my various recipes for “Deviled Eggs,” “Picnic Eggs,” or “Stuffed Eggs,” I found some surprising trends. The “Stuffed Eggs,” as most 19th century recipes called them, were often broiled, baked, or even… deep fried. The fried eggs were typically seasoned then the halves reassembled, bound together with raw egg, and then breaded and fried. I decided that type of recipe was another category altogether so I set those aside for another day.

Other “Stuffed Eggs” recipes pretty much resemble a deviled egg with the added step of heating the eggs up. I’m not sure why exactly this fell out of favor – it may have been because deviled eggs became associated with picnic food.
The concept of “deviling” dates as far back as 1786, allegedly referring to the spicy mustard or cayenne pepper used to season foods.

The term was not limited to eggs and the wildly-popular deviled crab.

The 1845 UK cookbook “The Cooks Oracle” follows a recipe for an anchovy toast spread, adding that a “Deviled Biscuit” could be made with the same spread on a warm biscuit “with a sufficient quantity of salt and savoury Spice, Zest, Curry Powder, or Cayenne Pepper sprinkled over it.” In Maryland cookbooks, I have found recipes for deviled: oysters, turkey, fish, tomatoes, clams, ham, lobster, chicken, pecans, crackers, and cheese.

Eggs are probably one of the easiest items to “devil,” and as a result, the most enduring. Early 20th-century newspaper recipes offer a few variations – meats mixed in, using the vinegar from pickled beets. It was in the mid-century that people really started getting creative with deviled eggs. For this post, I present two 19th century recipes*, served cold, plus one from nearly a century later.

“Chutney Eggs,” from the Park School cookbook contain a salty-sweet mixture combination that was not as weird as I first expected. One taster commented that they tasted like “peanut butter and jelly.”

Next go-round, I’ll take a stab at some of the hot and deep-fried eggs. Maybe I will discover why they didn’t remain popular!

Stuffed or Picnic Eggs:

19 eggs, hard-boiled
ham, chopped
.5 Cup cream
1 raw egg, beaten
.5 Teaspoon salt
.5 Teaspoon pepper
1 Teaspoon mustard powder
.5 Teaspoon sugar
.5 Cup vinegar

Boil nineteen eggs twenty minutes, then put in cold water, when cool take off the shells, and cut in half, remove the yolks and fill the whites with this mixture: one cup fine chopped ham, yolks of seven of the boiled eggs moistened with a salad dressing of one-half cup cream, one egg, one-half tea- spoonful of salt, one-half teaspoonful black pepper, one level teaspoonful of mustard, one half teaspoonful sugar, beat all together, andthe last thing, add one-half cup sour vinegar, set in a kettle of boiling water and stir till it thickens.

Recipe from “The Favorite Receipt Book and Business Directory,” Ladies Aid Society of the Church of the Holy Comforter, 1884

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Deviled Eggs:

12 hard-boiled eggs
a piece of butter the size of an egg
salt to taste
.5 Teaspoons sugar
.5 teaspoons mustard powder
1 tablespoon vinegar
parsley

1 dozen eggs; boil 20 minutes; throw into cold water to cool; peel and cut exactly in half; take out yolks; put them in small saucepan; add to them a piece of butter the size of an egg, a little salt, ½ teaspoonful of sugar, ½ teaspoonful of mustard, 1 tablespoonful of vinegar. Stir all together over fire until well mixed. When mixed put back into the place from which the yolk was taken so as to look like the natural egg; cut off the lower end of the egg, so as to make them stand on the dish. Dress with parsley; if used for breakfast put in oven and brown lightly.

Recipe from “Tried Recipes”, The Ladies Guild of the Associate Reformed Congregation, 1896

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Chutney Eggs:

12 hard-boiled eggs
¼ to ½ Cup chutney
6 slices cooked, crumbled bacon
3 Tablespoons mayonnaise

Halve eggs. Mash yolks and add next 3 ingredients. Stuff eggs.

Recipe from Mrs. George Dalsheimer in “The Park School Cookbook,” 1964

* Special thanks to Atomic Books/Eightbar for hosting a deviled egg gathering, and to Kristina Gaddy for successfully creating the 1896 recipe for deviled eggs – accompanying photos c/o Gaddy.

Rice Pudding, “The Favorite Receipt Book and Business Directory”

February 15, 2018January 12, 2019

After making the fudge recipe, I thought I’d delve a little more into the background on the “Favorite Receipt Book and Business Directory,” published in 1884 by the Ladies Aid Society of the Church of the Holy Comforter.

Unlike other charity cookbooks, this one doesn’t even name any of the women who might be involved in compiling it. The book doesn’t say what cause the book is benefitting, only that the money “is to be used for a benevolent purpose.” The introduction also gives a blanket endorsement to every single advertiser within the book, promising that they all sell “the best articles and at the most satisfactory prices,” and that “We” (presumably meaning members of the society), “have tested many of them ourselves and know whereof we speak.”

The first part of the book contains a lot of bossy advice about social graces and housekeeping. It turns out that that section has been lifted verbatim from the 1877 “Home Cook Book” by the Ladies of Toronto.

The Church of the Holy Comforter was established at Pratt & Chester Streets in 1876. (For a few years before that, the congregation had been meeting in another church.)

The Ladies Aid Society of the Church of the Holy Comforter appears to have been very on trend. In 1879 they held a Strawberry Festival – very popular for the time. Then, of course, there was this cookbook. In 1886 they started a Temperance Society. Maybe that’s what the book was raising money for and why they were so cryptic about it.

By far the most interesting thing about this book, however, is all of those advertisements. They give a great sense of the many types of specialized retail all over Baltimore at the turn of the century. Ice sales was a big one, which makes sense. There’s also multiple advertisements for places selling mattresses stuffed with husk and hair. Fire insurance is well represented. 10 years after the publication of this book, many customers doubtless cashed in.

Baltimore citizens had to go to a specialty store to buy an umbrella, lace, or “a gentleman’s two button walking glove.” Yet a store selling jewelry also sells trunks and cutlery. An advertisement for Stieff pianos is one of the most elaborately rendered. An ad for “Hutzler Bbothers One Price House” on Howard Street is simple text. The typo is real.

I made a rice pudding recipe from this book. Unlike many of the other recipes, it does not appear to be copied from the Canadian cookbook, but then again this is barely a recipe.

For what it’s worth, the famous fudge recipe is also original, or at least copied from somewhere less obvious. If you think about it one way, you could blame prohibition on fudge. That makes it seem a little less sweet now doesn’t it?

Recipe:

1 Cup rice
2 Quart milk
8 Tablespoon sugar
a little salt

One cup of rice, two quarts of milk, eight tablespoonfuls of sugar, a little salt. Soak the rice in a pint of the milk two hours, add the other ingredients, and bake two hours slowly.

Silver Cake

August 15, 2017January 12, 2019

I’ve never really been a “cake person.” For baking and eating, my memories tend to reside in the pie zone.

Then last year, when I graduated from reading the published canon of Maryland cookbooks on to the special collections at Maryland Historical Society, I began to notice a high ratio of cake recipes in personal cookery books. As I spent hour after hour poring over these old manuscripts (sometimes procrastinating on a lunch break – that didn’t help), I eventually started to feel like I was as intrigued by all of these cakes as the women who’d collected them.

But that’s not entirely possible, for reasons I will explain.

Good Housekeeping, 1890. Contains many variations on Silver Cake aka “Foundation Cake”

First I must mention what you will find in the average 150-year-old personal cookbook.

These books are often a combination of hand-written recipes and newspaper or magazine clippings. Some are fairly small and others contain such an overwhelming chaos of recipe scraps that you can easily imagine the compiler making a weekly hobby of collecting recipes from the newspaper ladies page or her subscription to “Good Housekeeping.”

These aren’t treasured family recipes any more than your average pinterest board.

I began to see a correlation between these recipes and the facebook videos shared by family and friends. (Hey cousins-o-mine – did you ever *really* get around to making those cheddar-ritz cracker-buffalo-chicken bites?) Watching these videos lets us live the sensation and imagine the tastes of familiar ingredients combining into something new. With that in mind, it’s easy to see how the infinite combinations of flour, sugar, eggs, and butter offered a middle-class 19th-century woman an opportunity to escape into a fantasy (and occasionally to live the reality) of impressing friends, baking a treat for her family, and of course – personal enjoyment.

This 1826 magazine contained cooking receipts as well as information on gardening, drunkenness, and public abuses. That’s news you can use!

In “Cake: A Slice of History,” author Alysa Levine traces the history of cakes up from breads and dense fruit cakes on to the cultural changes that made lighter, sweeter cakes so appealing to 19th-century home cooks. “American bakers,” she writes, “did not remain wedded to their British heritage of rich fruit cakes for long. They soon lost most of their fruit and brown sugar, in favor of the rich whiteness of pound or Savoy cake… Appearances started to matter, and especially cakes which made an impression on the buffet table.”

The most important factor would be the decreasing cost of sugar. Sugar made its way into American diets through the 18th-century and left people craving more and more. Technological advances like better ovens and baking powder helped make cakes a realistic and attractive vehicle for a dose of sugar served at a special gathering or an afternoon ladies luncheon. With the amount of sugar at our disposal today, we can experience only a fraction of the excitement that the original compilers of the recipe books found in MDHS might have experienced when they clipped or copied these recipes.

Trade cookbooks from the baking powder and appliance companies, in addition to newspapers and magazines, helped to spread cake recipes nationally. “Even the ascetic Catherine Beecher included recipes for the popular pair of silver and gold cakes (one made with egg whites and one with yolks), often cut to show their insides and presented alternately down the table,” writes Levene.

After coming across similar recipes a dozen times in old manuscripts, I opted to make the famous Silver Cake, which, having been popularized just before the widespread availability of vanilla, was frequently sweetened with almonds and sometimes rose-water.

Advertisement, “The Favorite Receipt Book and Business Directory”

The recipe that I used comes from “The Favorite Receipt Book and Business Directory,” an advertisement-packed little book compiled in 1884 by the Ladies Aid Society of the Church of the Holy Comforter in Baltimore. The book offers up pages of bossy advice on housekeeping and social observances plus recipes, including over fifty for cakes. I chose a silver cake recipe calling for ‘sour cream’ even though this ingredient in 1884 would be meant more literally. I used modern “sour cream” which had been watered down with some milk.

According to the Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink In America, the popularity of Silver and Gold cakes were “rapidly dwindling” by the end of the Civil War, to be reformulated and replaced by white and yellow cake. For me at least, working backward has changed my views on cake somewhat. Using modern knowledge about the cake order of operations (creaming butter and sugar, eggs one at a time, alternating dry & wet ingredients), these old recipes have a great texture and please the sweet tooth – all in all, they are well worth the fantasy.