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 Peaco*ck 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 Peaco*ck, 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.”
