Deviled Eggs


I'm always curious how certain kinds of food we eat today were originally discovered.  The cooked steak and the corn on the cob are no brainers – one is as easy as fire and meat, the other as easy as picking and biting, but what about intricately processed foods like deviled eggs?  Some ancient Roman– credited as the founding culture – must have tinkered mightily with all of the various stages of an egg's development in order to turn the chicken's gift into a 'spicy side dish.'  The ancient Roman would have to first decide to boil the eggs long enough so the insides stayed firm when eventually cracking.  He or she then would have cut it in half and realized that the yolk liked to conveniently peel away from the surrounding whites and that those yolks, when further mashed, became crumbly but creamy and hey, maybe they should be re-packed into the now open sockets of the remaining half egg?  This is where the 'deviled' part must have come into play over the years, for although the half-filled eggs would have served as a sturdy protein, the taste might have been a bit dull, so now it's time to spice them up a little bit. The "use of spices or spicy sauces with eggs, goes as far back as...the cookbook of Apicus, in which he reports that 'boiled eggs can be seasoned with pepper.'" Mustard, sour cream, tomatoes, capers, mayo, and paprika, are all now common spices used to 'devil' an egg.  The batch shown below, which I made for T-day the day before, and appropriately called Bella Tuscany Deviled Eggs, harkening back to its ancient Italian roots, included sun dried tomatoes, chopped capers, sour cream, salt and pepper for its body.  The two strands of sun dried tomatoes tented at the top add the lasting potent bite to these deviled eggs: