RATTLE THOSE POTS AND PANS

By RAFAEL ALVAREZ
“. . . golden dollops of silken delight nested in alabaster boats . . .”
– Billy Driscoll, Hamilton boy and poet of all things Baltimore

When Toni Clark was married 61 years ago this past June, she received a honeymoon surprise from husband Clyde Clark, known to all as “Skeets.”

“He bought me a cookbook,” said Toni.

Growing up in the 600 block of South Newkirk Street (now Greektown, a part of Highlandtown then simply known as “the Hill”), Toni left it to her sisters to learn old world Italian recipes from their mother, Mary Starteri Reda Adornato (1896-to-1964.) She didn’t learn to cook, she said, until after she got married.

That honeymoon gift from Skeets – a man with his appetite on the future – opened the kitchen door for Toni.

Adding to that first book of recipes, she amassed a culinary repertoire gleaned from a collection of cookbooks that would number more than 500 volumes.

“I had cook books from the gas company and the Western Maryland Dairy,” said Clark, who lived on 48th street in Dundalk for many years before moving to Forest Hill in Harford County.

“An older man who lived near Essex used to come by every couple of weeks and buy them from me for a dollar . . . five dollars for the big ones. My heavens, he bought a lot of my books.”

But what the old man from Essex didn’t get was Toni’s collection of handwritten recipes, which she has willed to her niece, Cindi Hemelt Gallagher. It’s a fat file of dog-eared and vanilla-stained index cards from friends and relatives that includes the anchor of any reasonable buffet:

THE DEVILED EGG!

“I like’em real nice and creamy,” said Clark, who pushes the hard yolks through a strainer for the proper consistency. “I don’t like’em lumpy.”

After whipping them up for generations of baby showers and summer cookouts, holiday gatherings and church basement funeral receptions, Clark stopped making deviled eggs more than ten years ago.

Earlier this summer, though, with a little prodding, Toni Clark came out of deviled egg retirement and was back on her game at a birthday party in the alley where she grew up with a score of first cousins between the Great Depression and World War II.

For my son Jake’s 26th birthday this past July, Clark brought a plate of beauties covered with plastic wrap. (It’s the rare cook who covers their deviled eggs with foil. The real pros use Tupperware.)

“It’s very simple to make deviled eggs,” said Clark. “You hard boil the eggs, cut them in half and take the yolk out. You put the yolks in a bowl with mayo. Some put them in a mixer but I strain them by hand.

“And I use apple cider vinegar and just a tip of a teaspoon of regular [yellow] mustard.”

(In some circles, the wet versus dry mustard debate rages when it comes to deviled eggs. But not around here.)

“Sprinkle with paprika and then you can decorate them anyway you want,” said Clark. “Maybe a slice of baby gherkin, real thin across the top.”

What deviled eggs “said” in the 70s

For Noelle Wright, the appearance of sliced white ovals filled with dollops of bright yellow heralded a night of suburban fun for her parents and their friends.

“I always knew my folks were having a swanky party when the deviled eggs came out,” said Wright, a Los Angeles screenwriter who grew up outside of Detroit. “They took their place right next to Swedish meatballs and bacon-wrapped water chestnuts!”

Dundalk girl Airin Miller, a recent graduate of the writing program at Virginia’s Hollins University, remembers deviled eggs at picnics with her mother’s city police colleagues and childhood family reunions.

In the Donnelly family, Mary Frances – daughter of Gene Donnelly, former spokesman for the archdioceses of Baltimore and Wilmington, Del. – remembered her “Nan” serving deviled eggs at the annual Preakness party. It was always there with other classics, like aspic,” said Donnelly, known as “Frannie.”

Pigging out . . . and the Blob’s connection

Then, of course, there’s the case of the deviled egg HOG (every family has one.)

This little piggy is the former Nancy Lee Hiebel (whose parents were part of the original wave of dreamers rehabbing houses in Ridgely’s Delight during the early years of the Schaefer Administration.)

Now Nancy Lee Mitchell – an Ellicott City middle school teacher and lead singer for the Plastic Magi rock band – young Nancy said she had no choice but to thieve deviled eggs.

“No one in my family made them,” she said. “I’d have to wait ‘til I was dragged to company picnics or family reunions.”

Once a huge round platter of those little devils was in front of her, she said, “there was no stopping . . .I always felt guilty eating so many because I knew they took a lot of effort to make – at least that was my mother’s excuse for not ever making them.”

Mitchell’s band opened for the Fleshtones this summer at a cancer benefit in Blob’s Park, the Bavarian beer garden in Elkridge that has seen tens of thousands of plates of deviled eggs come and go since the 1930s.

This past labor Day weekend, the egg urge seized Leo Ryan so powerfully that, in a move unthinkable in his parents’ generation, he actually consumed STORE BOUGHT deviled eggs. It was better than none at all on a holiday weekend protests the 50-year-old Ryan, deputy state’s attorney for Baltimore County.

“We went boating on the bay and were asked to bring lunch, so my wife and I stopped at Pastore’s on Loch Raven Boulevard to get Italian subs for everyone,” he said.

In the chill case, along with the other dairy items, Ryan spied packages of deviled eggs – two halves for $1.29 – and tossed them in the cart with a bottle of Stewart’s root beer.

Although Ryan – a resident of Towson by way of Shrine of the Little Flower – believes that “deviled eggs need to sit on a buffet table for at least a few minutes to reach peak flavor,” he made concessions to his cravings. “I ate them in the car on the way to the marina,” he said. “My wife wasn’t happy that I didn’t save one for her.”

Heretics & Apostates Among the Devils
(or: What Not To Bring to Kimmie’s Daughter’s Bridal Shower)

Mild paprika, your average supermarket brand (anyone have a phone number for Ann Page?) is the standard spice sprinkled over deviled eggs, more for the eye than the tongue in that “mild” teeters on the edge of “bland.”

Historically, though, in Western culture, the word “deviled” has been used to suggest highly spiced food, with the phrase in use for years before turning up in English literature during the mid-18th century. Thus, the use of hot paprika – or even smoked – would give the eggs their moment in culinary hell.

Recently, a New York Times food writer suggested the simple addition of tomato paste to the yolks that would not only “tint” the filling but “add a sweet, fruity flavor [to] balance out the spicy part of the equation. In France, they are called œuf mimosa and finely chopped parsley is mixed with the yolks and mayonnaise.

In Spain, where the locals are fond of putting hard boiled eggs and canned tuna in everyday salads, there is an appetizer known as “Salmon Stuffed Eggs.” A recipe for them can be found in Penelope Casas’ 2003 book of tapas recipes published by Knopf.

Those wild and crazy Hungarians mash hard-boiled yolks and mix them with milk moistened bread, mustard and parsley before refilling the cavity. These concoctions – when served as an entrée – are then baked, topped with sour cream and served with French Fries.

The Global Village approach to deviled eggs includes fillings made from nuts, wasabi, chutney, capers, caviar (as they do in the Netherlands), spinach, and poppyseed.

Germans are known to add a touch of anchovy, which the average American has never even liked on pizza. And new wave foodies sometimes load the hollow with hummus.

“I’d be strung up if I brought deviled eggs with hummus in them,” said Mary May Maskell, deviled designee for a large Baltimore family of Irish-Catholics: 11 siblings and their offspring capable of devouring 72 deviled eggs in a matter of moments.

“Sometimes my brother Bobby puts an olive on top of his and everybody’s like, ‘What’s with the olive, Bob?’”

The family recipe – rooted in Germany – is the legacy of Maskell’s “great, great aunt Lil,” known as “the legendary cook.”

Mary Elizabeth “Lil” Benzinger [1860-to-1945] was the sister of Maskell’s father’s grandmother. It was Benzinger’s grandfather, a German, who began the family line in America. “They have to be just like my mother [Agnes Ripple May] made them,” said Maskell, 48, of Parkville “with a hint of vinegar” from yellow mustard.

A dental hygienist and alumnus of the Institute of Notre Dame, Maskell believes the tradition will continue through her niece Jeannie, 39. She has, however, noticed a trend: the younger generation isn’t interested in the work it takes to make a plate of deviled eggs – “a lot of time and effort” – even though appetites for them have not waned.

“I really like watching people enjoy them,” she said, looking forward to making a batch for Thanksgiving. “But if I don’t hide the eggs as soon as I arrive, they’re gone in ten minutes.”

– Rafael Alvarez can be reached via diablo@alvarezfiction.com