Holed up in her Minneapolis apartment, Atlanta-raised writer Emily Strasser got a hankering for the deviled eggs of her childhood. She cracked into the power of food memories, the history of these savory snacks, and what deviled eggs might tell us about who we are and who we might become.

Story by Emily Strasser | Illustration by Lauren Monaco

If you’re wondering where the other six are, I already ate them.

It started on a Zoom reunion with high school friends about a month into quarantine, when one of my friends admitted to a sudden and persistent craving for deviled eggs. He’d never made them before, never even really liked them, but now, alone in an apartment in Boston, he couldn’t stop thinking about that creamy, tangy taste. As soon as he said it, the rest of us perked up. Had anything ever tasted better than a deviled egg? In our Southern childhoods, deviled eggs were the staple of every potluck, family reunion, and funeral — all the gatherings of celebration and grief now made impossible by the pandemic. We speculated that now, isolated indefinitely, we craved the taste of the community we couldn’t have. 

Within a couple of days, we were texting each other photos of our deviled egg attempts, exchanging critiques and recipe tips, a sort of asynchronous potluck. Too much mayo. Where’s the paprika? If you’re wondering where the other six are, I already ate them. 

Curious about what others were craving in quarantine, I conducted an informal poll on Facebook: friends were cooking holiday recipes out of season, carb-heavy comfort foods, and other potluck favorites. Among the Southerners who responded to my admittedly unscientific poll, deviled eggs were a clear favorite. Days after our Zoom call, my white friend’s Black co-teacher told her, unprompted, about the deviled eggs he’d served his family the night before. “Do white people eat deviled eggs too?” he asked. 

Deviled eggs were part of the landscape of my upbringing, as benign and reliable as bread. But now, I began to wonder: if the pandemic is a kind of pressure cooker on both personal and societal levels — clarifying values, bringing out hidden longings, suppressed rages, and quiet joys, and exacerbating global injustices — what can we learn about ourselves from what we’re craving in crisis? Where do deviled eggs come from and what do they mean? What do we find in the apparently benign? 

I wanted to understand more about the role of early food memories in times of crisis, so I reached out to Susan Whitbourne, a professor of psychological and brain sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She explained early food memories are located in this nexus in the brain between emotions and smell and taste and memory. They’re powerful because they engage all five senses and are contextually linked to emotionally-rich memories of family, tradition, and ritual. Food memories are subcortical, meaning they are primitive, nonverbal, nonlogical memories that can be provoked by stress. So it makes sense, Whitbourne said, that in this time of upheaval, we should find ourselves craving comfort foods before we can articulate why.

A collection of oral histories about deviled eggs, gathered at the 2004 Southern Foodways Alliance Symposium, revealed the deep emotional pull of this ubiquitous comfort food. The collection demonstrates both the diversity and commonalities of deviled egg recipes, from insistence on brand-name mayo to more unusual ingredients like anchovies, cracker crumbs, and sour cream. What was nearly universal, though, was the intensity of memories surrounding the humble food. “Every time I make deviled eggs or hear about them, the door to the house of good memories and comfort foods opens once again. Not only can I see the food we had, but I can smell the water AND, the gas and oil,” recalls Linda Weiss, transported to the riverside picnics of her childhood. “Chill them and eat them and try to recall the first one you ever ate,” instructs Winston Hoy. 

“I think it’s definitely one of the most evocative foods,” renowned Southern chef Scott Peacock agrees over the phone. The deviled eggs of his Alabama Gulf Coast childhood featured sweet relish juice, mustard, Kraft Miracle Whip (“kind of a scar” on his childhood), and paprika (“the only time [it] came out of the cabinet.”) Today, he prefers the more elegant recipe he learned from his friend and mentor, the legendary queen of Southern cooking, Edna Lewis. Lewis blended her yolks smooth with heavy cream and added a touch of sugar. “Silky and suave,” says Peacock, that egg “draws you in and has secrets to tell.” He served deviled eggs at Lewis’ memorial in 2006. 

Cooking nostalgic foods, reflects Whitbourne, can be a way of “retracing your steps back to this earlier self of yours, rewinding time, as it were.”

Cooking nostalgic foods can be a way “retracing your steps back to this earlier self of yours, rewinding time, as it were.”

- Susan Whitbourne, professor of psychological and brain sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst

If we rewind time, we find deviled eggs in ancient Rome, where boiled eggs flavored with spicy sauces were so commonly served as an appetizer that a Roman saying, “ab ovo usque ad mala,” meaning “from egg to apples,” referred to the expected bookends of a meal. A dish featuring peahen eggs stuffed with songbirds covered in “peppered yolk of egg” even appears in Petronius’ first century novel, The Satyricon. Stuffed eggs seasoned with spices, oil, and murri, an Arabian sauce made from fermented barley, appeared in medieval Andalusia, and traveled from there across Europe. “Deviled,” a term first used to describe spicy foods in late 18th century Britain, presumably because the “heat” of the seasoning was associated with the fires of hell, refers to the eggs’ picant flavoring.

Deviled eggs can be enjoyed, with regional variation, across much of the world; they’re a reminder that what we claim as our own comes from a long and interconnected history that includes the rise and fall of empires, trade, migration, and intercultural exchange. Indeed, one of the finalist recipes in the Southern Foodways Alliance contest came from Elizabeth Williams’ Sicilian grandmother. To fit in with her adopted New Orleans milieu without losing the familiar flavors of her heritage, she made deviled eggs with mayo instead of olive oil, and seasoned the yolks with anchovies, garlic, and lemon zest. 

Deviled eggs found their way to American cookbooks, in both the North and the South, starting in the late 19th century. By the 1940s, special platters with oblong indentations designed to hold deviled eggs became a standard gift for Southern brides. And if today deviled eggs might appear at a potluck in Connecticut, they’re a necessity in Georgia. Carla Hall, of “Top Chef” and other TV acclaim, whose culinary roots lie in the soul food of her Nashville, Tennessee, childhood, recalls arriving at a party with her sister to discover that the spread lacked deviled eggs: “We were scandalized,” she writes. “ … There were a lot of whispers and raised eyebrows among the ladies after that.”

So it wasn’t like the division of the haves and have-nots, like some foods are.

– Jennifer Hill Booker 

But why do we love deviled eggs so much? 

I called Atlanta-based chef and cookbook writer Jennifer Hill Booker to discuss what deviled eggs mean in the South. Booker’s culinary influences include her classical French training and her childhood on a farm in the Mississippi Delta. She shared her pimento cheese stuffed deviled eggs with bacon and fried shrimp on the “Today” show’s 2019 “United Plates of Thanksgiving” special. Like many, she remembers deviled eggs on Sundays, on her grandmother’s Easter table, and especially during summertime church revivals. “You would know who made the best deviled egg,” she says. “And you would wait for that person.” Her family raised chickens on the farm, and she speculates that part of what made deviled eggs so popular in the South is that household chickens were common and everyone had ample access to cheap, inexpensive eggs. “So it wasn’t like the division of the haves and have-nots, like some foods are,” she says. 

In addition to holidays and church revivals, Booker remembers deviled eggs as a delicious component of the “shoebox lunches” of her childhood. During the American Apartheid era, Black families provisioned their journeys across the South, where safe and welcoming stops for food were rare, with meals packed in shoeboxes. As a young child at the tail end of this period — the Civil Rights Act of 1964 formally ended segregation of restaurants and other public spaces — Booker experienced the packed meals as exciting, promising the adventure of travel and her favorite foods: fried chicken, some kind of cake, maybe a corn muffin, and deviled eggs. (A similar meal might have also been packed by poor white families who couldn’t afford restaurant stops on their travels — but Black families of all classes had no other options.) In response to my worry that the deviled eggs would be squished, Booker assured me that they were the first thing to be eaten: “They didn’t have a chance.”

In the context of a shoebox lunch, deviled eggs hold a tension between isolation and community. On the one hand, there’s the overt isolation of travelers confined to a car while driving through hostile country. There is literal segregation, the unjust and unequal separation of human communities. On the other hand, the fact of the journey and the existence of the lunches pointed to a network of relationships, from those who prepared the food, to the family and friends on both sides of the journey, to the intimacy of travelers sharing the meal in the car. Shoebox lunches, writes Amanda Yee, “allowed for cultural expression in an uninhibited way, subverting expectations of silence and compliance … they allowed creative freedom and offered nourishment of the soul.” 

“So you’re packing lunch,” reflects Booker, “and you’re also packing hope for the future that you get through safely to your destination. You’re putting in love … cooking all your favorite foods. And then the fragility of that deviled egg … all it takes is the wrong turn. Literally.” 

As Adrian Miller, culinary historian, self-described soul food scholar, and former assistant to President Clinton on racial reconciliation efforts, puts it, “eating deviled eggs is one way to highlight the commonality between Blacks and whites.” 

One of my mother’s most potent memories of deviled eggs is of eating them at the lavish fundraiser potlucks hosted by the Black Baptist church that neighbored her family’s white suburban Methodist one. “They were always the first thing to go,” she says.    

It’s tempting to close it there, to say deviled eggs represent the best of what the South can be — hospitality even in scarcity, regional traditions with ancient and global roots, and common humanity across race. But a heartwarming story of racial unity is too easy for a region, and a country, built on genocide and slavery. Deviled eggs may be one of the most universally beloved and nostalgic foods of the region, but as a white Southerner, I’m suspicious of my own nostalgia. 

Nostalgia gives us plantation houses repurposed as wedding venues. Nostalgia gives us revisionist histories claiming the Confederate flag has nothing to do with slavery. Nostalgia, or perhaps I should say white nostalgia, is the illusion of innocence and ease, the whitewashing of history. 

To write her celebrated Sook’s Cookbook: Memories and Traditional Receipts from the Deep South, Truman Capote’s aunt, Marie Rudisill, collected recipes from 19th century plantation day books — ledgers that slaveholders used to keep track of accounts, including the names of enslaved people and their production outputs. Some of Rudisill’s recipes include notations by the enslaved chefs or servants who prepared the food. The particular plantation her deviled egg recipe came from, she informs the reader casually, was a resort for wealthy plantation owners and a training ground for Confederate soldiers. 

Deviled eggs are undoubtedly a food of community; but it’s worth asking — whose community, and at whose expense? 

We might also consider where our eggs come from, and the labor required to get them to our table. While Booker’s family ate eggs from the chickens they raised themselves, today we are increasingly alienated from our food supply. If you wanted to make deviled eggs at the beginning of the pandemic, you may not have been able to. When lockdown measures began in mid-March, grocery stores struggled to keep cartons stocked as consumers hoarded essential supplies, and chicken hatcheries and coop suppliers sold out as people turned to backyard chicken farming. Shortages were fueled by fears of scarcity, but they were also driven by our collective turning to older forms of comfort, security, and homemaking; we’ve been baking more cakes, planting more gardens, doing more crafts, yearning for a past we may not even remember. 

While shoppers were scouring bare shelves for eggs, egg farms supplying the food service industry euthanized tens of thousands of laying hens as hospitality demand plummeted. COVID-19 outbreaks have spread in poultry plants throughout the South, where frigid and close-quarter working conditions are punishing in the best of times. Weeks after Georgia’s hasty reopening, cases spiked in the state’s massive poultry industry, which supplies tens of millions of pounds of chicken and 7 million table eggs daily. By mid-June, a quarter of poultry plant workers were testing positive, exacerbating outbreaks in rural areas, especially among the Latino, Black, and immigrant populations that make up the majority of the state’s poultry workers.

Food is going to have to be a unifier right now.

– Samantha Fore

Chef Samantha Fore traces her culinary inspiration to her Sri Lankan heritage and her Southern upbringing; I scheduled a call in May to talk about her Sri Lankan curried deviled eggs recipe, about diversity in the South, and about her use of food as an intercultural ambassador. We talked four days after George Floyd was murdered by police 1 1/2 miles from my Minneapolis apartment; three weeks after Ahmaud Arbery’s murderers had finally been arrested in Georgia; and two weeks after the emergency room technician Breonna Taylor had been shot by police while sleeping in her own apartment in Louisville, Kentucky, my mother’s hometown, 80 miles from Fore’s home in Lexington. We didn’t feel much like talking about deviled eggs. They felt small and stupid.

We talked about the protests for a while, about how infuriating it was that the media coverage kept emphasizing the “violence” that destroyed only property in response to hundreds of years of state-sanctioned police violence against Black lives. And we talked about how, in contrast to the prevailing media narrative, Ruhel Islam, the owner of a beloved Minneapolis Bangladeshi-Indian restaurant, had responded to the news that his business had been damaged with support for the protestors: “Let my building burn. Justice needs to be served.”

Eventually, I asked Fore about her work addressing food insecurity in her community during the pandemic. Fore had been busy, putting aside her pop-up restaurant to work with The LEE Initiative, feeding hundreds of meals a night out of an industrial kitchen and distributing essential supplies such as diapers and dog food to those who couldn’t afford them. Fore told me the Lexington kitchen had just served its last meals on May 31, 2020, and it was moving into phase two: an effort to help small farmers and independent restaurants recover from their staggering economic losses. She was especially excited about supporting farmers of color. 

In less turbulent times, Fore’s not-so-secret mission is to introduce Southerners to Sri Lankan food by combining the two cuisines. She makes fried chicken brined in chicken curry, spice-crusted ribs, and coconut rice porridge flavored grits. She likes to watch people when they taste something they’re skeptical about: “There’s this moment when their eyes open up and they’re trying to figure out what’s happening.” She aims to build trust through accessibility and use approachable dishes as a “gateway” to more traditional Sri Lankan foods. 

Her coconut curry deviled eggs, inspired by her favorite “Sri Lankan breakfast situation,” use coconut fat instead of mayo as a binding agent, and they are spiced with turmeric, cinnamon, fenugreek, curry leaves, and pickled onions. Though she grew up in North Carolina, Fore didn’t eat deviled eggs as a kid; but she recognizes the spirit of deviled eggs — food as a community binding agent — from her own upbringing. Sri Lankan and Southern culinary culture, Fore contends, have a lot in common: from ingredients like okra, to similar dishes like deep-fried Sri Lankan fish balls and Southern salmon croquettes, to,  principally, an ethos of hospitality — the need to feed others. During her pop-ups, Fore keeps an eye out for the diners who are not touching their food; she can’t stand to see a guest leave unfed, and enjoys the challenge of finding a dish they’ll eat. She reminds me of the way my mother unfailingly prepares at least twice the amount of food needed for a dinner party, and eyes her guests’ plates to be sure everyone has found something they like.

“Food is going to have to be a unifier right now,” Fore says. “Everyone is hurting too much. We all need a snack. We need to sit, we need to snack, and then we actually need to do something.” 

After a beat she says, “I know. We need a lot more than a snack.”

“pulverize the yelks … chop fine some smoked tongue or lean old ham.” 

– Housekeeping in the Blue Grass: A New and Practical Cook Book, 1875

We can’t rewind time, but would we really want to? When we emerge from our isolation, crowd once more around picnic tables to eat finger food off shared platters, into what world will we enter? 

While nostalgia may risk romanticising an unjust and complicated past, many scholars argue that “critical nostalgia” can help us both reclaim what is useful and beautiful in our histories, and build a better future through a clear-eyed examination of the past. Citing his studies of a community in Northern Ireland, the folklorist Ray Cashman argues that nostalgia “can provide the raw materials from which people may responsibly revise their memory of the past and their identities in the present” and reclaim “the ideal of community in the midst of sectarian violence.” Let what we love help us become who we wish we’d always been.

On a Sunday in early October, as my partner and I move slowly through the apartment, I decide to make deviled eggs. Though I’ve tried many recipes while writing this essay, today I just want the flavor of my own earliest memories. 

I’d planned to pick up a dozen eggs from the farmers market, but we are quarantining after a potential COVID-19 exposure, so I settle for the store-bought brown pasture-raised eggs in our fridge. As I boil them, I think about my mother and her mother making deviled eggs, and the long line of women before them. When I began my research on deviled eggs, my mom managed to dig up my great-great-great-grandmother’s “dressed eggs” recipe from the 1875 cookbook, Housekeeping in the Blue Grass: A New and Practical Cook Book: “pulverize the yelks [sic],” the recipe instructs, and “chop fine some smoked tongue or lean old ham.” I won’t recreate that recipe — I’m a vegetarian — but as I peel eggs, I meditate on what abides, what has changed, and what’s emerging.

My grandmother, who we called Mamma, was a fierce intellectual with a roving spirit, largely thwarted by the strictures of her time. Born today, she probably would have pursued a Ph.D. rather than become a high school Spanish teacher; she might never have married. My mom even wonders if her mother was a closeted lesbian. Having settled for a role in which she never really fit, she became bitter as she aged, watched Fox News all day long, and shouted at the TV to correct the anchors’ grammar.

Mamma took little joy in cooking and resented housework. She was a cake mix kind of cook, a Miracle Whip woman. Still, in a rare flourish, she sometimes added curry powder to her deviled eggs, a flavor she picked up while teaching in Panama as a young single woman, when an Indian woman taught her to make chicken curry; it was one of the few dishes she enjoyed making from scratch. 

I use the organic mayo in my fridge. Instead of Mamma’s sweet relish, I chop pickles I made from cucumbers grown at the organic farm where I’ve been working this season. I skip curry powder in favor of cayenne pepper — my mother’s addition. 

I blend everything together with the sturdy old electric hand-held mixer rescued from my grandparents’ kitchen when they moved to assisted living. Finally, after I’ve spooned the mixture back into the egg-white halves, I sprinkle on smoked paprika from Your Dekalb Farmers Market. The massive Atlanta international grocery store has barely changed since my childhood, when my mom pushed a cart through aisles of fresh turmeric, durian, cassava, Georgia peaches, and piles of collard greens stacked to the ceiling, past foodies and families from every race and class, immigrants and refugees from Ethiopia, Burma, Vietnam, Mexico, and all over the world, beneath a ceiling hung with international flags. On visits home, I always stop there to restock my spice cabinet from its abundant and affordable bulk supply. 

In the middle of the country in the middle of a pandemic, far from family, isolated from friends, the two of us polish off a half-dozen deviled eggs for lunch. They don’t make me feel better, exactly, but a little bit softer, a little bit tender, grateful for this connection to the past, to this taste of home, messy as it is.

My Family Pays the Price for America’s Chicken Dinners

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