Home › The Principles of Cookery › Devilled Biscuit
Devilled Biscuit
Make a seasoning of cayenne, anchovy paste, salt, and curry powder; butter some captain's biscuits, lay the mixture over and grill, or make a paste of cheese, mustard, and salt, and spread over when toasted. Butter unsparingly. Time, from five to ten minutes. Probable cost, 1d. per biscuit.
A savoury for the end of dinner, of the sort Victorian and Edwardian households served after the sweet course. The whole thing is a seasoned butter or cheese paste on a hard biscuit, put under heat only long enough to melt and blister.
- Captain's biscuitsA hard, unsweetened ship's-type biscuit, finer and paler than hardtack and closer to a thick water biscuit. Plain water biscuits, Carr's-style table crackers or matzo crackers stand in; anything with sugar or seeds will fight the cayenne and anchovy.
- Grill means broiler"Grill" here is the overhead salamander or grill of a coal range. Use a broiler on high with the rack in the upper third, or a toaster oven; the biscuit is already dry and only needs the topping to bubble.
- The five to ten minutes is for a cooling rangeThe five to ten minutes is generous -- Under a modern broiler these are done in one to three minutes, and anchovy paste and cheese both scorch bitter. Watch them rather than timing them, and pull as soon as the surface blisters.
- Two versions, not oneThe recipe gives alternatives: a devil paste of cayenne, anchovy, salt and curry powder that goes on before grilling, or a cheese-mustard-salt paste spread on the biscuit after it is toasted. Do not combine them.
- Quantities are left to youNo proportions are given, which is common in recipes of this kind. A workable starting point is soft butter with anchovy paste at about a quarter of its volume, then curry powder and cayenne to taste, remembering that anchovy paste is already very salty and the added salt is easily overdone.
- "Butter unsparingly"This is the hinge. The biscuit is bone dry and the butter is what carries the seasoning and keeps the crumb from turning to dust; a thin scrape gives a harsh, powdery result.
- Cheese choiceFor the second version use a dry, sharp cheese grated fine and worked into butter with mustard, so it melts rather than oils out. English mustard is the likely intention in a book of this period; Dijon reads as milder and sweeter.
- Yield and servingCount two or three biscuits a head as a savoury course, and serve them hot straight from the grill. They go limp within a few minutes.
Savouries are the vanished course of the English formal dinner: a small hot salty mouthful served after the sweet and before dessert fruit, meant to finish the wine. Anything called "devilled" in Victorian cookery meant sharply seasoned with cayenne, mustard and something pungent, a usage generally traced to the late eighteenth century and applied to kidneys, bones, biscuits and almost anything else that would take heat. Captain's biscuits were the respectable end of the ship's-biscuit family, sold by grocers as a plain keeping biscuit for cheese, and their hardness is exactly why they suit a grill. The costing of a penny a biscuit shows what the appeal was: a dish assembled from the store cupboard, dependent on butter and seasoning rather than on any cooking at all. Curry powder in the devil mixture is a reminder of how thoroughly the spice had been absorbed into British larders by the end of the nineteenth century, treated as a seasoning on the same shelf as cayenne.