I called Atlanta-based chef and cookbook writer Jennifer Hill Booker to discuss what deviled eggs mean in the South. Booker’s culinary influences include her classical French training and her childhood on a farm in the Mississippi Delta. She shared her pimento cheese stuffed deviled eggs with bacon and fried shrimp on the “Today” show’s 2019 “United Plates of Thanksgiving” special. Like many, she remembers deviled eggs on Sundays, on her grandmother’s Easter table, and especially during summertime church revivals. “You would know who made the best deviled egg,” she says. “And you would wait for that person.” Her family raised chickens on the farm, and she speculates that part of what made deviled eggs so popular in the South is that household chickens were common and everyone had ample access to cheap, inexpensive eggs. “So it wasn’t like the division of the haves and have-nots, like some foods are,” she says.
In addition to holidays and church revivals, Booker remembers deviled eggs as a delicious component of the “shoebox lunches” of her childhood. During the American Apartheid era, Black families provisioned their journeys across the South, where safe and welcoming stops for food were rare, with meals packed in shoeboxes. As a young child at the tail end of this period — the Civil Rights Act of 1964 formally ended segregation of restaurants and other public spaces — Booker experienced the packed meals as exciting, promising the adventure of travel and her favorite foods: fried chicken, some kind of cake, maybe a corn muffin, and deviled eggs. (A similar meal might have also been packed by poor white families who couldn’t afford restaurant stops on their travels — but Black families of all classes had no other options.) In response to my worry that the deviled eggs would be squished, Booker assured me that they were the first thing to be eaten: “They didn’t have a chance.”
In the context of a shoebox lunch, deviled eggs hold a tension between isolation and community. On the one hand, there’s the overt isolation of travelers confined to a car while driving through hostile country. There is literal segregation, the unjust and unequal separation of human communities. On the other hand, the fact of the journey and the existence of the lunches pointed to a network of relationships, from those who prepared the food, to the family and friends on both sides of the journey, to the intimacy of travelers sharing the meal in the car. Shoebox lunches, writes Amanda Yee, “allowed for cultural expression in an uninhibited way, subverting expectations of silence and compliance … they allowed creative freedom and offered nourishment of the soul.”
“So you’re packing lunch,” reflects Booker, “and you’re also packing hope for the future that you get through safely to your destination. You’re putting in love … cooking all your favorite foods. And then the fragility of that deviled egg … all it takes is the wrong turn. Literally.”