Home › The Principles of Cookery › Devil, Dry
Devil, Dry
Score the drumstick, gizzard, or any other part of turkey, fowl, veal, or mutton kidney. Rub the meat to be devilled with pepper and salt, put a thick coating of made mustard over this, with as much cayenne as liked. Broil over a clear fire.
A "dry devil" is a way of dressing cooked leftovers — the parts of a roast bird nobody claimed — in mustard and cayenne and crisping them under fierce heat. The whole thing works or fails on the heat being high and the meat being already cooked.
- Start with cooked meatCooked or raw -- the recipe does not say. Devils were often a way of using cooked remnants (the drumstick off yesterday's roast, cold veal), but kidney was as often grilled from raw. Gizzards are the awkward case: they are tough and want long simmering before they will take to a grill at all.
- "Made mustard"Mustard powder mixed to a stiff paste with water, i.e. English mustard. Any prepared mustard from a jar will do, but the sharp English kind is what the seasoning is built around. Mix a fresh batch and let it stand ten minutes for the heat to develop.
- "A clear fire"A fire burned down past flame and smoke to steady red embers; in a Victorian kitchen usually coal, though charcoal serves. Under a modern grill or broiler, use the highest setting with the meat 3-4 inches from the element; a very hot ridged pan also works.
- Score deeplyScore -- the recipe gives no depth or spacing. Cuts deep enough to let the mustard and cayenne reach past the surface are the point of the instruction; that is what separates a devil from a coated drumstick.
- TimingIf the meat is already cooked you are only heating it through and crisping the coating, a few minutes a side, turning once. Raw kidney or veal must be grilled until cooked through. Either way, too long and the mustard scorches bitter and the meat dries out.
- Cayenne"as much as liked" is the recipe's own escape clause. A quarter teaspoon per portion is assertive; half is aggressive.
- ServingOne good drumstick or a whole kidney per person, as a savoury at the end of dinner or a breakfast dish. No sauce: that is the point of a dry devil.
Devilling -- coating something in mustard, cayenne and pepper and grilling it hard -- was an English answer to the problem of the cold joint, and the verb was in culinary use by the end of the eighteenth century. The "devil" is usually explained as the ferocity of the seasoning, though that reading is traditional rather than documented. The book's separate entries distinguish the dry devil, which relies on a paste rubbed into scored meat, from the wet devil, in which the same seasonings go into a sauce or gravy; devils are associated with the savoury course, the small sharp dish served after the sweet at a formal dinner. The parts named here are telling: drumsticks, gizzards and kidneys were the awkward remnants of a large roast, and the mustard did as much to freshen day-old meat as to flavour it.