When I first brought home the foot-thick wedge of 'Craddock Cookery' magazines from Chapters I was a very bad new-purchase Mammy indeed. They stayed, unloved & un-looked at, in their paper bag for a long enough time that a thick crust of dust formed on them. Then one day, after hoovering off the crust, I pulled a random one out for a goo. My eyes fell upon this photo
and instantly I was hooked, never to be more than arms reach away from my trusty bottles of harmless blue & green food colouring again. What were these little racist egg pie things? Why would anyone make them? How old were these magazines that putting little snouty 'Chinese' faces on eggs was still an acceptable thing to do?
My little eggy friends are from the 'Specially for Small Fry' cook-a-long with Mammy section (along with many other amazingly unappetising looking treats like Lemon Pigs & Pastry Bears and surprisingly tasty looking Stuffing Ducks).
To make your own angry chinese egg man (and let's face it, who isn't gumming for a hard boiled egg sitting in a puddle of green mayo) you will need
- 1 ig
- Splodge of Mayo
- Tomato
- 'Harmless Green Food Colouring' & 'Harmless Blue Food Colouring'
- 1 pastry case (or the glass lid of one small dessert dish stolen from the Moevenpick in Berlin in my case)
Start out by hardboiling your egg. I'm not great at eggs and figured it would be a wobbly disasterfest of escaping yolks and egg men collapsing in on themselves if it was underboiled so I pretty much stuck it in a pot of boiling water for the morning. Rock solid it was.
In a little dish mix together your green food dye & the mayo to make the 'grass' for your egg man to stand on
Slice a thin layer of egg from the bottom of your hard-boiler (the instructions specify 'very thin', I ignored this to the detriment of my poor egg's hat)
Cut a hat from your tomato (a nice slice of the end of the 'mato)
Using a 'fine writing pipe' (or a biro shaft if you're me and aren't 100% on what a 'fine writing pipe' might be) to poke little circles out of your egg slice to decorate the tomato. My egg slice was too thick (oh faily faily faily) and so my egg got a shite hat. Sorry egg. These bits of egg will stick AS IF BY MAGIC to your bit of tomato. That was a lesson learned, egg white & tomato are friends.
Now - pop egg in mayo (flat end down, clearly) and grab yourself a skewer or toothpick & a bottle of gel food colouring dab on 2 little racist slanty eyes, a mouth and a pair of 'gloomy whiskers' . Some of the egg men in the photos had a little racist snout thing so I decided to go all out. Only I accidentally put my snout under my whiskers, resulting in angry egg men with severe facial deformities. I Also forgot the mouth. Maybe he's so angry because he has to be fed intravenously. Maybe the smell of toast has tormented him his whole life.
Crown your egg with his hat and 'there you have a very unusual kind of hardboiled egg tartlet which you can eat up when you have admired your own work sufficiently' (This bit should be read in the piping BBC English tones of the great Fanny C. herself)
Puzzling me right the way through this is the fact that not once, in the whole page of instructions on dying mayonnaise and piping it into pastry tartlets, was the over-riding mushroomishness of the whole thing mentioned. He's even standing in grass mayonnaise. Are Chinese people known for wearing red, polka-dotted hats and standing in grass? Did they just not see it? Or did someone with a penchant for pulling their eyes out slanty at dinner parties and embarrassing their wife with crap jokes vandalise a tray of 'mushroom tartlets' just before the photos were taken. Hmm.
Next up - Lemon Pigs
