Cookbook Club – The Soul of a New Cuisine

For our June cookbook, we used Marcus Samuelsson’s The Soul of a New Cuisine. In it, he includes traditional foods of Africa as well as his own African-inspired creations. I was looking forward to this meal because I haven’t had many opportunities to eat African food, and also because we had used another one of Samuelsson’s cookbooks (The Red Rooster Cookbook) previously and it was one of my favorite Cookbook Club meals. You can join us on our full exploration of the flavors of Africa on my Cookbook Club site – for now, my dish!

When I saw the recipe for an egg salad that used chilies, paprika, and soy sauce rather than mayonnaise, I was sold! The Spiced Egg Salad sounded like a very unique take on egg salad that I definitely wanted to try.

I sautéed chilies, onions, and garlic. I should note here that the recipe also called for sautéing peanuts, but since some people have nut allergies I skipped that step.

I added paprika, ginger, and chili powder and cooked until fragrant.

I transferred the onion mixture to a bowl and added boiled eggs, tomatoes, cilantro, soy sauce, lime juice, olive oil, and salt.

I gently folded all the ingredients together. Voila – spiced egg salad!

The flavor of the sautéed onion mixture was incredible, but it got a bit watered down once all of the other ingredients were added, especially the two tomatoes which released a lot of liquid. It ended up feeling more like a tomato salad than an egg salad, especially since the juices from the tomatoes dissolved most of the egg yolks. I would make this dish again, but use only one tomato which I will salt ahead of time to release the juices.