Food nostalgia: Mum’s devilled eggs & 80s salad

Talk about food nostalgia! Devilled eggs are one of those dishes that take me RIGHT BACK to my childhood, with the first bite. Do you have a dish that does that for you?

Devilled eggs were a classic that my Mum would pull out whenever guests came over. We had devilled eggs with almost every barbecue (and we had a lot of barbecues). They were right up there on her “tried and true” list, with prawn cocktails.

It was 30 degrees outside when I made these devilled eggs, so I paired them with a simple salad for dinner. I call it “80s salad” because I swear we ate a salad like this at least once a week for the entire decade of the 80s. It was the least sophisticated, least pretentious salad you can imagine. The percentage of ancient grains, buffalo mozzarella or kale was exactly zilch. This salad had iceberg lettuce, friends. Remember iceberg lettuce? And whatever other veggies we happened to have to hand which, in my childhood, meant staples from the veggie patch: tomatoes, cucumber, celery. I added fresh pineapple to my salad, because I found some in the back of the ‘fridge and it was still good.

Mum’s devilled eggs recipe

6 hard boiled eggs 2 tablespoons of chutney (or in this case, 2 tablespoons of Jayne’s homemade tomato relish, which did the job admirably well) 1 tablespoon mayonnaise 1/2 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce Salt and pepper, to season

Peel the hard-boiled eggs*, then cut them in half, lengthwise. Put the yolks in a bowl with all the other ingredients, then mush and mix them all together.

Spoon the mixture into the empty halves of the egg whites.

In Mum’s recipe, it says to garnish the eggs with slices of cucumbers, and I am a rule-follower (most of the time), so that’s what I did.

Wash it all down with chilled, cheap plonk. This bottle cost me $10, because I am all class.

* Is it just me, or does anybody else think hard boiled eggs are a LOT more difficult to peel these days? The egg shell comes away in tiny little shards that cut your fingers, and half the time manages to take away giant chunks of egg-white with it.

That didn’t used to happen when I was a kid. Are they feeding something different to the hens? Or did they feed something different to the hens back when we were kids? Every time I make hard-boiled eggs for the kids, these days, I wonder at how difficult they are to peel.

Naomi Bulger, bringing you the hard-hitting news of the nation.

ps. Want more food nostalgia? This is how the Great Custard Controversy panned out.