I don’t suppose there are a LOT of people in this country who recall reading the adventures of the Grey Ghost and Panther, a superhero team centered in a secret headquarters with a sign that said ‘SUPERSECRET HEADQUARTERS” on the lawn. The Panther’s equally secret identity was college professor Ursula I. Underwood, whom the Grey Ghost regularly addressed as “Deviled Ham.”
I was reminded of this recently when, discussing this most famous product, when someone asked “What is deviling, and how do you do it?”
I checked, and I find that you devil only two different foods: ham and eggs. Looking over the history of both these viands, I am convinced that there are places in this country where the two are served side by side, and a potluck lunch would not be the same without the two of them.
The “deviled” part of the name refers to extra spices, as you can see I Italian restaurants which offer a diavolo sauce on pasta or pizza. This part of the name has led to the eggs being referred to as “stuffed eggs” or “church eggs” in places where they still avoid drawing attention from infernal regions. It has also occasionally led to advertising bans.
There are no established traditional recipes for either of these foods, though the usual recipe for anything involving deviled ham simply involves opening a can from Underwood. (William Underwood, a British food expert who landed in New Orleans and then walked to Boston, pioneered the canned goods, especially sardines, which fueled the Western Movement and, incidentally, were also cited by some of the first complaints about littering.)
I note that, oddly, for something that is supposed to be spicy, all the DIY recipes for deviled ham involve mayonnaise, as do all the recipes for deviled eggs. The basic recipe for deviled eggs is “Hard boil the eggs. Slice in half the long way. Take out the yolk. Mash the yolk with mayonnaise and whatever else your grandmother used. Scoop back into egg.” Both deviled eggs and deviled ham are also subject to the hors d’oeuvres panic of the postwar world. The Fifties, especially, was an era of garnishing, so crackers with deviled ham and diced pineapple could be found next to deviled eggs tricked out with cocktail onions and maraschino cherries. This may have been the point at which several recipes added dill pickles to the yolk mix, still standard in many parts of the U.S. Nowadays, of course, the Interwebs spills over with interesting things to do with both of these foods, including slicing the eggs the short way across to make a deeper well for the filling and removing the filling from sandwich cookies and spreading deviled ham inside for a “savory surprise”. (Expect more people to be killed with cocktail skewers this fall. I’m surprised I have NOT found any recipes which involved stuffing deviled eggs with deviled ham, but maybe I just missed that page.
Yes, I hear your brain whirling. Devil’s food cake has no particular relation to these other dishes: they don’t call it Deviled Cake (yet.) Devil’s food cake was invented somewhere in the nineteen-aughts as an answer to Angelfood (or Angel’s Food) Cake, invented in the 1870s. Angelfood cake is light and airy; devil’s food was designed to be the darkest, heaviest chocolate cake around, with several diabolical twists on normal chocolate cake to make it denser and chocolatier.
I do suppose there are minds at work even as we speak, trying to reverse the process, and come up with angeled eggs or angeled ham (something less, spicy, I suppose: maybe a blend of mayonnaise and non-dairy whipped creamer, with marshmallows or….no. Surely any good angel would prefer a simple d…stuffed egg.)
Blogsy Babbles 