Photo by Parker Michels-Boyce
There are two things every Southern woman needs to be able to produce: a genuine string of pearls and a platter of deviled eggs. If I have learned nothing else in my 41 years on this patch of soil, I have learned that.
I garnered the first as a college graduation gift, a beautiful strand from the Virginia-based jeweler Fink’s that ushered me into the world of womanhood. My mother, ever the hopeful Southern matriarch, assured me that while my strand was fine, it would be my husband who would buy me the perfect second, high-end strand.
Seventeen years later, there is no husband and, on my schoolteacher’s salary, no perfect second strand.
Nor, for that matter, have I produced the perfect platter of deviled eggs.
It seems I am doomed to forever produce hard-boiled eggs that look like elongated moons with craters.
My quest for egg-peeling perfection has taken me to old cookbooks, countless videos and blog posts, Michael Ruhlman’s cookbook “Egg,” and every other book on the subject I could find, plus a lot of trial and error. Emphasis on the error.
Nevertheless, I persist.
In the summer of 2015, I cooked a dozen eggs for Chef Vivian Howard. I was living among her clan while recipe-testing her cookbook, “Deep Run Roots,” and the egg chapter emerged with her mother’s version of deviled eggs. Vivian, too, confessed that peeling an egg was a tricky business, and that the main thing was just finding someone who gave a damn. This made me so happy to hear — she gets it! So I set out to make her proud and, by all means, give a damn.
As I worked, I secretly hoped that she would take the finished product with her on her family’s weeklong beach vacation, but once the whole Howard clan left the compound, her house echoed with the unspoken waft of failure emanating from the fridge.
Undeterred, I continued to search for the answer.
YouTube delivered me a buff and energetic man who promised he could solve all my egg-peeling problems. I simply needed to boil my eggs with baking soda, and when done, crack two small holes at both the top and bottom of the egg. Then, taking the small end of the egg to my mouth, just give it a hard blow and — plop — out pops the perfect egg.
I’ve never achieved the promised plop; in fact, my eggs came out destroyed.
Scouring the internet, I read countless “life hacks.” Someone said to put a lemon peel in the water. Someone said to plunge the boiled eggs into ice water and let them sit for 10 minutes. Someone said to peel them while they sit in cool water. Someone said to place one boiled egg at a time in a Mason jar with a bit of water, screw on the lid and shake vigorously. That last one only helped me make a crunchy version of egg salad.
Surely, I thought, the answer was to be found in books. Surely, the words I needed were in some dusty collection of “receipts.”
Using my mother’s trove of barely bound Southern Living, Junior League and small church compilations, I paged through yellowed volume after yellowed volume. The first thing I noticed was just how short the recipes are. They consisted of ingredient lists and one, occasionally two, very short and to-the-point paragraphs. If there was a recipe that called for peeled eggs, it simply listed the boiling time and the instruction to peel. No words of encouragement, no tips, no guidance as to process.
It was as if this knowledge that I desperately craved was, to the cooks of that time, simply assumed. As if they all just knew, and so it was therefore not necessary to set it down in writing.
Before the computer and the cellphone, our grandmothers and mamas would have passed this knowledge down to us in real time. We would have learned it, alongside them in the kitchen, the only words spoken,“Watch me now.”
I reached out to local chefs Lee Gregory of The Roosevelt and Southbound and Mike Ledesma of the forthcoming Perch. While not Southern women, these men are accomplished and worthy of their status in the Richmond food scene. Surely they would know the secrets.
Gregory didn’t entirely understand why it was so important to me to have this mystery unraveled — and in truth, I was beginning to wonder the same thing — but he was a gentleman. It turned out he follows much of the wisdom I learned from Chef Vivian — with a twist. He plunges his hot eggs into an ice bath, cracks them when a bit cooled, then plunges them back into the ice bath and peels them under running water.
Ledesma echoed this process. After 13 minutes of hard boiling, he gently cracks them as he lowers them into an ice bath.
It seemed an ice bath was the answer, but it also seemed too simple, too “right there all along.” I sensed that the real answer may be at my fingertips.
In her search for egg-peeling guidance, writer Anna Moriah Myers found herself at Sally Bell’s with Billy Thompson, a third-generation cook at the Richmond institution. (Photo by Parker Michels-Boyce)
Often we don’t see or learn from what is right in front of us. Sally Bell’s Kitchen, a Richmond landmark, sits less than a mile from my house. This family-run business cranks out dozens upon dozens of deviled eggs on a daily basis. How had this not been my first stop?
Billy Thompson, a third-generation cook at Sally Bell’s, which won a James Beard Award in 2015, later told me he peels 120 eggs a day. Thompson begins his workday at midnight. I joined him in the kitchen six hours later one bitterly cold morning in December. I could hear the whirring of mixers as I rapped on the steel double doors in the back of the kitchen.
Thompson invited me in to the kitchen with a warm, easygoing smile. The air smelled of sugar, and I immediately felt at home.
“I don’t have any eggs,” was the first thing out of his mouth.
“You have no eggs to cook?”
“Yeah.”
I clutched my nonexistent pearls. The egg delivery hadn’t come.
“I do have a few we could do,” he lamented after I nearly fainted on the concrete floor. A few to Thompson is about 18.
“That’ll do, Billy,” I said. “That’ll do.”
He put the cold eggs in a large stockpot, running cool tap water over them. He added about a half-cup of what he calls “flour salt” to the water, tinfoiled the pot and set it on a high flame.
Billy is the backbone of this operation. No one has told me this, but it was clear to me just from his midnight list — boil and peel 120 eggs, make mayonnaise, make cupcakes and bake the bread that’s later sliced for hundreds of sandwiches each day.
While we waited for the eggs to boil, he walked me to the front of the store to show me a framed picture of his grandmother. She’s the prominent figure holding a tray of deviled eggs in a newspaper feature. She’d worked at Sally Bells for 60 years. Her daughter, Thompson’s mother, worked here for 40 years, and Thompson, who learned his now-memorized recipes from his mother, was logging his 25th year.
This, I thought, is why I’ve come here. If you’re going to learn how to do something, learn from those who have the skill in their DNA.
As we began the process of peeling, Thompson said, “Some eggs just don’t want to peel,” and I felt a 30-year weight lift off of me.
Taking out my phone to film him, I marveled, as I watched his hands, at how quickly and effortlessly he worked. This was intuitive for him.
His instructions? “Just use your thumb,” as he perfectly peeled egg after egg, cracking an end and working with a time-honed rhythm. The finished product resembled a bowl of gleaming pearls.
“This is an art, Billy,” I said aloud, “and you don’t even know you’re Vermeer.”
Billy didn’t understand the motivation behind my quest or why in the world I needed to watch him peel an egg. He graciously showed me his craft while unaware of all the books that I had read, the recipes I had researched and the dozens upon dozens of hours I had spent in the kitchen, frustrated.
What he knew was this: the filling of tap water, the half-cup of salt, the tight tinfoil lid, the high heat, the cool tap water cool-down, and the feel. Most of all, the feel.
When I confessed to him the reason I’d come, he seemed mystified as to why I would care so much about his method. Oh, Billy, I thought, don’t you know? You can’t learn this stuff from books.
Over the next several weeks, I would pull up the footage on my phone to watch, again and again, his masterful hands work round those orbs, as I attempted another batch in my kitchen. “This is an art, Billy,” I said aloud, “and you don’t even know you’re Vermeer.”
One night I had something of a breakthrough. Putting a pot of eggs on to boil, I added a teaspoon of very fine salt, covered the pot with a lid and left the eggs to boil hard for about 12 minutes. Then I immediately ran cool water over them until the water was cold enough that when I dipped my hand in, I felt a chill.
I picked an egg from the water, cracked it lightly at its topmost point, and began sliding my thumb to find the “thin skin.” I worked more slowly than Thompson had, much more slowly, my hands yet to memorize the landscape and feel.
Seven eggs came out nearly perfect — my best performance yet. Three others still had small divots and pockmarks.
It will come, I told myself. Or, it may not.
I understand now that when Thompson said, “Some eggs just won’t peel,” what he was really telling me is that however I peel my eggs is the right way.
Through his words and example, I have come to accept the little cracks and crevices not as abominations, but as perfect imperfections.
I have come to accept something else, too, which is that being a Southern woman is about more than the myths I was raised on. My single strand of pearls glistens every time I take it out of its silk-lined box. And my eggs sometimes just don’t peel. And that is enough.
The Best Egg Salad Sandwich You’ll Ever Make
For times when you wanted deviled eggs, but those suckers just won’t peel (Recipe provided by Anna Moriah Myers)
24 slices of white bread (the kind that Sunbeam makes and is fit for a queen)
10 peeled (ha!) hard-boiled eggs
1/2 cup plus 1 tablespoon Duke’s mayonnaise (or another brand, if you HAVE to)
1 1/2 tablespoons chopped fresh dill
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon freshly ground pepper
12 teaspoons butter (softened at room temperature)
Chop the eggs into ¼-inch cubes and place in a medium mixing bowl. Stir in the mayonnaise, dill, salt and pepper.
Take 12 slices of bread and spread each with 1 teaspoon of butter.
Spoon about a ¼ of a cup of egg salad onto the buttered side of each bread slice and top with an unbuttered slice. Repeat until all sandwiches are made.
Trim each sandwich of its crust. Cut each sandwich into four triangles.
Serve on a doily-lined silver tray along with cucumber sandwiches, cheese straws and candied pecans. Revel in your accomplishment.
