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Beef Bones, Broiled
There are few dishes more appetising than broiled bones, whether of beef, mutton, or poultry. Great attention should be given to the fire. If not clear the bones will be blackened and lose their nice delicate flavour. Divide them if necessary, rub them with a little clarified butter, then with pepper, salt, and mustard, and broil over the fire for about five minutes. Serve alone or with sliced potatoes fried and very hot.
This is a leftovers dish: the bones meant are those from a roast or boiled joint, with browned meat and gristle still clinging to them. Nothing here is raw, and the five minutes is about crisping and heating through, not cooking.
- Start with cooked bonesRib bones, short-rib bones, mutton chop bones or poultry carcasses from a joint already roasted, with a good amount of meat left on. Raw bones will not work in five minutes and should not be attempted this way.
- "Broil" means grillIn this book broiling is direct radiant heat on a gridiron over clear coals, not the modern American oven broiler. A charcoal grill or a ridged cast-iron pan over high heat gives the nearest result; an overhead broiler on its highest setting works, with the bones close to the element.
- A clear fire is the hingeThe warning about the fire is the whole instruction. Coals must be past the smoking stage and glowing, or the fat dripping off the bones flares and coats the meat in soot. On a gas or charcoal grill, wait until flames have died and set the bones slightly off the hottest spot.
- Clarified butter, not wholeWhole butter's milk solids burn immediately at this heat. Clarified butter, ghee, or beef dripping from the original roast all hold up; the recipe itself calls for clarified butter.
- MustardThis means dry English mustard powder, rubbed on with the pepper and salt. Prepared jarred mustard adds vinegar and water and will steam rather than form the dry, spicy crust intended.
- TimingFive minutes, turned once or twice, suits bones still warm from the carving board. Bones taken cold from the refrigerator will need longer and are better started further from the heat so the interior warms before the outside chars.
- Cutting them down"Divide them if necessary" means reducing a rack or carcass to manageable pieces. Cutting between rib bones or jointing a poultry carcass can be done with a heavy knife; sawing through bone itself is a job for a butcher or a bone saw.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantities; serve as a savoury or light supper. The fried sliced potatoes are essentially chips, and are what turn it into a meal.
Broiled or "devilled" bones were a fixture of nineteenth-century English supper tables and club dining rooms, eaten late in the evening with a glass of something, and prized precisely because they were a way of getting one more good mouthful off yesterday's joint. The mustard-pepper-salt rub is often said to be what earned such dishes the name devil, though the derivation is traditional rather than documented; the term was applied through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to anything highly seasoned and grilled, and devilled bones turn up often enough in Victorian fiction and club anecdote to show how ordinary they were. Such recipes reflect the period's assumption that a household would be roasting whole joints and would need instruction on what to do with the remains, an economy that all but vanished once meat began arriving as boneless portions.