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Fowl, Grillade Of
Score deeply the legs of a cold roast fowl or of any kind of game; and cover them thickly with a sauce prepared by mixing two spoonfuls of salad-oil, a spoonful of chutney, a spoonful of anchovy, a spoonful of mustard, and a little cayenne. Let them lie in this for an hour or two; then grill them over a strong, clear fire to a bright brown colour, and serve them very hot. Send either dry toasts or rusks or piquante sauce to table with them.
A Victorian devil: cold roast bird, scored, coated in a hot paste, and browned hard over the fire. It is a leftovers dish, and the legs are used because dark meat survives a second cooking without drying.
- The scoring is the pointThe recipe says "score deeply": cut through the skin and well into the flesh. The cuts let the paste reach the interior and give the edges that catch and blacken under high heat; a smooth, unscored leg simply steams inside its coating.
- "A spoonful"Unspecified; a tablespoon is a reasonable reading, and the proportions are a starting point rather than a rule. Two parts oil to one each of chutney, anchovy and mustard makes a loose paste, enough to coat a few legs.
- Salad-oilPlain olive oil in the period, sold for dressing rather than frying. Any neutral or mild olive oil works; it is there to carry the seasoning and help the surface brown, not to flavour.
- AnchovyProbably anchovy essence or bottled anchovy sauce. Anchovy paste from a tube is the closest survivor; if using whole salted fillets, mash one or two to a pulp and expect a saltier result.
- ChutneyA sweet, spiced fruit chutney; mango was the commonest. Chop any large fruit pieces small or the paste will not spread evenly into the cuts.
- MustardEnglish mustard, either made up from powder or from the jar. It is doing most of the heat work alongside the cayenne, so a mild yellow mustard will leave the devil undevilled.
- A strong, clear fireA charcoal grill burned down to glowing coals with no flame, or a modern broiler at its highest setting with the rack close. Five to eight minutes a side, turning once, is usually enough to brown and heat the meat through; the bird is already cooked, so the aim is colour and heat, not doneness.
- Rusks and piquante sauceRusks are twice-baked dry bread, and the toast serves the same purpose: something plain to absorb the oil and cut the salt. Sauce piquante here is a brown sauce sharpened with vinegar, shallot and chopped gherkin or capers.
- YieldTwo legs make one serving as a savoury or breakfast dish. Serve straight from the grill; the coating dulls and softens as it cools.
Devilling — scoring cold meat, plastering it with mustard, cayenne and something sharp, then grilling it hard — was the standard British answer to yesterday's roast throughout the nineteenth century, and it turns up repeatedly in Cassell's. The name is generally traced to the eighteenth-century use of "devil" for anything fiercely spiced, and the dish is often said to have belonged to the male, clubbable end of the day: breakfast, the supper tray after the theatre, the savoury course after the sweet. The chutney and cayenne in this particular version mark it as a later, imperial-era devil; the anchovy essence is older, a survival of the English taste for salt fish as a background seasoning. It was a technique a cook was expected to apply to whatever cold bird the larder held.