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Cayenne and Salt (Blanch and shred the almonds)
Blanch and shred the almonds, then fry them brown in the butter. Mix the chutney, gherkins, Worcester sauce, cayenne, and salt on a plate; turn this mixture into the pan with the almonds and mix well. When quite hot serve on croûtons.
A savoury of devilled almonds on fried bread, printed here without its ingredient list — the quantities lived in a heading that has been lost, so this needs reconstruction before you can cook it.
- The missing quantitiesThe title ("Cayenne and Salt") reads like the tail of an ingredient list that has not come through with the method; nothing in the text tells you how many almonds or how much butter. As a working proportion only, 4 oz (about 1 cup) blanched almonds, 1 oz (2 tbsp) butter, 2 tbsp chutney, 2 chopped gherkins and a teaspoon of Worcester sauce will cover roughly six croûtons.
- BlanchingPour boiling water over shelled almonds, stand two minutes, drain, and the skins slip off between finger and thumb. Shred means cutting lengthwise into slivers with a knife while they are still damp and soft — dry almonds split and crumble.
- The hinge: fry the almonds first, aloneThey must be browned in butter before anything wet joins them, or they steam rather than toast and the dish is limp. Work over moderate heat and stir constantly; almonds go from gold to burnt in under a minute, and butter browning underneath them hurries it.
- ChutneyThe recipe names only "chutney"; a sweet bottled mango chutney is the likeliest reading. Chop any large lumps of fruit small so the mixture coats the almonds rather than sitting in clots.
- "When quite hot"This means heated through and no longer — perhaps 30 to 60 seconds after the chutney goes in. Sustained cooking caramelises the chutney sugar and it will weld to the pan.
- CroûtonsNot the soup dice of today. Here they are rounds or fingers of bread, roughly 2 inches across, fried in butter or clarified fat until crisp and drained. Fry them before you start the almonds and keep them warm; the topping will not wait.
- Yield and servingOn the proportions suggested above, enough for about six small croûtons, served hot as a savoury. One or two per person -- this is a mouthful, not a course.
This belongs to the savoury, the small hot, sharply seasoned dish that closed a formal British dinner after the sweet and before dessert fruit — a course often said to have served to reset the palate for port, and one that had largely disappeared from home cooking by the middle of the twentieth century. The Anglo-Indian stamp on that course is unmistakable: cayenne, bottled chutney and Worcester sauce were the shorthand for "Indian" in a late-Victorian and Edwardian professional kitchen, and dishes labelled devilled or Indian usually meant nothing more precise than hot, sweet and pungent at once. Chutney by this date came from a jar; commercial mango chutneys had been imported and imitated in Britain through the nineteenth century, and cooks used them as a seasoning rather than a relish. The lost ingredient list is itself a period artefact — high-class cookery books of the 1890s and 1900s set quantities in a block above the method.