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Indian Devil Mixture
To a table-spoonful each of vinegar, ketchup, and chutney-paste add an ounce of dissolved butter, a dessert-spoonful of made mustard, salt, and a small cup of good rich gravy. Blend these ingredients thoroughly, and rub them into the meat. Make all hot together slowly. Time, ten minutes to make hot.
A devil sauce for reheating cold roast meat or poultry rather than a dish in itself. The whole thing hinges on the word slowly: the meat is already cooked, and hard heat will only toughen it and turn the mustard bitter.
- Ketchup means mushroom or walnutIn an English kitchen of this period ketchup usually meant an unsweetened, near-black mushroom or walnut condiment, salty and savoury, though bottled tomato ketchup was also to be had. Tomato ketchup will make the mixture sweeter and pinker; mushroom ketchup, or a splash of Worcestershire sauce, is closer to what is likely meant.
- Chutney-pasteA thick, ground chutney sold as a paste rather than in whole-fruit pieces. Any thick mango chutney worked smooth with the back of a spoon will do.
- Made mustardMustard already mixed with water or vinegar, as opposed to dry mustard powder. A dessert-spoonful is two teaspoons; English mustard gives the heat the recipe intends.
- MeasuresAn ounce of dissolved butter is about two tablespoons melted. A "small cup" of gravy is somewhere near half a cup, but the vessel is not standardised here, so add it gradually until the mixture is a thick coating paste rather than a pourable sauce.
- Salt with careMushroom ketchup, made mustard and reduced gravy are all salty in their own right. Taste the blended mixture before adding any salt at all.
- Rub it in properlyScore the cold meat lightly, or slash a chicken leg to the bone, so the mixture reaches past the surface. Devilling that only sits on the outside tastes of condiment rather than of the meat.
- The ten minutesTen minutes over low heat is enough to warm cooked meat through; the recipe directs that it be made hot slowly and says nothing of an oven. Do not let the mixture boil: prolonged heat drives off the volatile mustard oils and leaves it flat.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield, but the quantity would dress something in the region of a pound of cold meat, enough for two or three at breakfast or supper.
Devilling was the standard Victorian answer to cold meat, and by the time Cassell's compiled its dictionary the word had long been in English culinary use, recorded from the late eighteenth century — the earliest citations are of the 1780s — as a term for anything grilled and fiercely seasoned. The "Indian" here is Anglo-Indian rather than Indian: chutney, cayenne and bottled sauces came home with returning Company families and were absorbed into the British breakfast table alongside kedgeree and mulligatawny. Recipes of this kind also had a plain economic function in a household that roasted large joints and served them again cold for two or three days afterwards, with a sharp paste rubbed in to disguise the fact.