Deviled Egg Salad

We had egg salad sandwiches frequently when I was growing up. We also had tuna salad and chicken salad. I liked them all. It wasn’t until I was a teenager that I realized you couldn’t eat egg, tuna, or chicken salad from just anyplace. In fact, all of them were generally ill-advised anywhere but home. MY home, specifically.

My mom makes great egg salad. (And tuna salad. And chicken salad.) I like her egg salad a lot, but I had no idea it was dramatically different from run-of-the-mill egg salad until I ordered egg salad somewhere else.

I’ll never forget it. I was playing high school team tennis. One afternoon I finished my match early, and I was STARVING. I had to stay at the courts because other team members were still playing. The off-hours snack bar menu at the tennis club was very limited, but an egg salad sandwich on toasted white with chips sounded like just the thing to revive me.

Yeah, not so much.

When the egg salad sandwich came, the egg salad part was pretty white. It was so loaded with mayo that it was almost soupy, and the sandwich slid apart when I tried to pick it up. Worse, it smelled like mayonnaise, and not at all like egg salad.

I’m sure I ate the chips. I can assure you that I didn’t eat the sandwich.

My Mom’s egg salad was yellow and tangy with mustard, and had only enough mayo to hold it together. It was also lively with dill relish (not sweet relish), and was properly seasoned with salt and pepper. But I’ve since realized the most important difference was probably the texture.

Mom didn’t chop the boiled eggs with a sharp knife, she mashed them with the back of a dinner fork. It doesn’t take any longer than slicing or chopping, but the results are remarkably different. First, it’s easy to arrive at uniformly-sized egg bits with no weird hunks of egg white. Second, the fork-mashing creates a craggy surface on all of the egg bits, allowing the dressing to blend with the egg rather than simply sit on a slick surface. The result is an egg salad that requires less mayonnaise, and isn’t the least bit slimy. Finally, the finished product is better if you use eggs you’ve boiled and peeled, but haven’t refrigerated yet. The dressing penetrates the unchilled egg better, and everything melds into a more cohesive–and tasty–whole.

I learned quickly at the shop that we could make lovely egg salad sandwiches, and only a few customers would buy them. Since this recipe is essentially the same as my family’s deviled eggs except the yolk and eggs aren’t separate, we started labeling it “Deviled Egg Salad”. Ding, ding, ding! “Deviled” was the magic word.

“So it’s like your deviled eggs?” they would ask. “Yes, only in salad form,” Jenni would explain. Them: “It’s not real mayonnaise-y?” Jenni: “No. Malia isn’t a big mayonnaise person, either.” And out the door the sandwiches would go.

Turns out I wasn’t the only one wary of unknown egg salad.

The following recipe is for Deviled Egg Salad made with 4 hard boiled eggs. This makes two large sandwiches easily.

Full disclosure: I’ve served this exact same Deviled Egg Salad as “Deviled Egg Dip” with crackers at catering events. There’s never any left.