Deviled Eggs: notes, technique, and a recipe

 

Chances are you can hardboil an egg. But tell me, how are you at peeling that egg? Until recently, hardboiled eggs Chez IK looked like they’d won first place at the local tractor pull.

Enter Gabrielle Hamilton, she of the dictatorial Prune Cookbook.

Spend any time with this highly idiosyncratic work and find yourself caught between admiration and utter frustration. Ostensibly written for new hires at Hamilton’s New York City restaurant, Prune’s recipes are set out “per order.” Sometimes these orders are whittled down to home kitchen portions; often they are not. Consider the Smokey Braised Beef Brisket–let’s not even discuss the french fries that go with. You’ll need the entire brisket, weighing in at 8 pounds. Want to make grilled ribeye steak? Grab yourself a “whole #109.” Butcher your 109 into 13 orders weighing between 14-16 ounces each. If you’re slick, and can carve 14 steaks out of your 109, even better.

Woe betide the home cook preferring–or needing–to cook in lesser quantities.

Nevertheless, should you be willing to ride the tide of Bourdanian insults and enormous portions, you’ll learn a lot. If the idea of downsizing restaurant yields annoys or intimidates, turn to “Prep Daily/Weekly” and “Garbage.” Consider Mixed Meat Stock with Walk-in Detritus, useful even if you don’t have a walk-in. Surely you have detritus; I certainly do. The Garbage section is true genius, putting to use scraps most of us would toss. Do you save smoked fish skins? Did you ever think of flinging them in a pan with soy sauce, scallion, mirin?  I sure as hell didn’t until Hamilton told me to, and they’re amazing. So are zucchini tops, which for whatever dumb reason I thought inedible. It takes a Gabrielle Hamilton to re-think ingredients like that. Which is why people like me willingly fork over $45 for her book, whole 109 or no.

Then there’s Hamilton’s advice about neatly peeling hardboiled eggs.

The perfectly peeled egg may be summarized in two words: cold water. As the Talmudic scholars say, the rest is talk.

This recipe is a two parter: there’s the boiling/peeling/ultimate beautiful white process, and there’s the stuffing. None of this is difficult. Rather, it is a way of addressing the deviled egg that removes deviltry from preparation, leaving the flavor up to you.

Before launch, the excuses, or advice I did not follow.

Excuse number 1, concerning the piercing of eggshells:  I did not pierce the eggshell with a pushpin, a step taken to prevent exploding eggs. Believe me, I tried. But my pushpins must be dull, or my eggs especially stubborn. The pins wouldn’t penetrate the shells. The eggs did not explode. They never do.

Excuse number 2, concerning ice cubes: Most people have refrigerators dispensing ice on command. Not for nothing is this blog titled “the Insufficient Kitchen.” In addition to all our other problems, the fridge lacks an ice maker. However, multiple varieties of tendonitis means multiple varieties of icepack in my freezer. Added to a bowl of water, they create instant ice baths.

This is a fine time to confess that while creating one ice bath, I grabbed an icepack from the freezer and found a missing wrist brace–the small wristband type–stuck to it. This icepack lives inside a fabric sleeve; evidently the wrist brace, which had gone AWOL the night before, had affixed itself while I’d iced down my tendonitic elbow.

Although Prune offers much advice concerning unannounced Health Department visits–for example, hiding serrano ham in the oven–Hamilton is oddly mute on the topic of frozen wrist braces.