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Devil Gravy
Take three table-spoonfuls of melted butter, and the same of good gravy; add to it a dessert-spoonful of cayenne pepper, one of pounded loaf sugar, a glass of ketchup, and the same of white wine, with the juice of a lemon. Make all warm together, then pour it over the devilled turkey, goose, or fowl.
A devil sauce for reheated roast birds, and one whose measurements need reading in period terms before you scale anything. The cayenne is the item to handle with judgement.
- "Melted butter" is a sauce, not butterIn Victorian English kitchens melted butter meant the standard flour-thickened butter sauce — roughly a tablespoon of flour cooked in a tablespoon of butter and let down with about half a cup of water or stock. Three tablespoons of that gives body; three tablespoons of plain liquid butter will simply split out of the finished sauce.
- A glassA "glass" here is a wineglass, about 2 fl oz (4 tablespoons). So roughly 2 fl oz ketchup and 2 fl oz white wine against 3 tablespoons each of butter sauce and gravy — a thin, sharp sauce by design.
- KetchupNot tomato. Cassell's-era ketchup is mushroom or walnut ketchup: dark, thin, salty and intensely savoury. Mushroom ketchup is still sold; a mix of dark soy and Worcestershire sauce sits in the same register if you cannot find it. Tomato ketchup will make the sauce sweet and cloying.
- The cayenneA dessertspoon is about 2 teaspoons, which in the roughly 8 fl oz of finished sauce is ferocious even by devilling standards. Start with a quarter teaspoon and build up by taste; adulteration of cayenne was a documented nineteenth-century complaint, so period cayenne may not have matched modern ground chilli for heat.
- Pounded loaf sugarLoaf sugar was hard refined sugar broken and crushed for use. Caster sugar is the direct equivalent — about 2 teaspoons.
- Warm, do not boil"Make all warm together" is the whole instruction that matters. Bring it only to a bare simmer: boiling drives off the wine's aroma, dulls the lemon and can curdle the butter sauce. The lemon juice is best stirred in at the end, off the heat.
- Yield and useAbout a cup, enough for two to four portions of devilled bird. It is a dressing sauce poured over already-grilled cold roast meat, not a braising liquid, so have the meat hot and the sauce ready at the same moment.
Devilling was the standard Victorian answer to the cold remains of a large roast: joints or wings were scored, coated with mustard and cayenne, grilled hard, and served with a sauce of the same character. The verb is generally traced to the eighteenth century, when "devilled" simply meant made fierce with pepper and mustard, and by the time Cassell's Dictionary of Cookery appeared in the 1870s it had become a fixed part of the breakfast and supper repertoire, particularly after Christmas, when there was turkey and goose to use up. That the sauce leans on mushroom or walnut ketchup, cayenne and a wineglass of white wine says a good deal about the late-Victorian store cupboard, where bottled savoury essences did the work now done by stock cubes and hot sauce.