Deviled Meat
Rub together 1 tablespoonful of soft butter, 1/4 teaspoonful of dry mustard, a dash of cayenne and ½ teaspoonful of salt, then gradually add 1 teaspoonful each of Worcestershire and vinegar. Cut underdone meat in slices and on both sides rub a little of the mixture. Heat I spoonful of butter in a frying-pan and in it quickly grill the slices, serving them as fast as sizzling.
A leftovers dish: cold rare roast beef, painted with a mustard-and-cayenne paste and flashed in a hot pan. The whole thing takes about five minutes once the paste is mixed.
- The hinge: the meat is already cooked"underdone meat" means slices of cold rare roast, most likely beef, though the recipe does not say. The pan work is only to heat the slices through and blister the paste, so a minute or less per side over high heat is right. Anything longer and cooked beef turns grey and dry.
- "Grill" here means searThe recipe uses the word loosely for cooking over fierce direct heat in the pan. Use a heavy skillet, get the butter foaming and just beginning to colour, and work in batches so the slices sizzle rather than steam.
- Slice thicknessCut about a quarter-inch thick. Thinner slices overcook before the devil paste has time to catch; much thicker and the centre stays cold.
- The devil pasteOne tablespoon soft butter, 1/4 teaspoon dry mustard (any English-style mustard powder will do), a pinch of cayenne, 1/2 teaspoon salt, then a teaspoon each of Worcestershire and vinegar worked in gradually so the mixture does not split. Half a teaspoon of salt is generous for one tablespoon of butter; scale it back if the roast was already well seasoned.
- Malt or cider vinegarAn unspecified vinegar would most often have been cider vinegar; malt suits the Worcestershire equally well. Avoid balsamic, which is too sweet for this.
- Butter and smokeButter alone will brown fast at the heat this needs. A little neutral oil in the pan with the butter buys you some margin without changing the flavour much.
- YieldThe quantity of paste given coats roughly six to eight slices, enough for two to three people as a light main dish with toast or fried potatoes.
- Serve at onceThe instruction to serve them "as fast as sizzling" is not a flourish. Reheated cooked beef stiffens quickly, so plate straight from the pan onto warmed plates.
Devilling — coating meat with mustard, cayenne and something sharp, then cooking it hard — was a fixture of British and American cookery, and the name is generally traced to the heat of the seasoning rather than to any particular cook. It belonged above all to the breakfast and supper table, where cold joints, bones and poultry legs from the previous day's dinner were revived rather than discarded. The pennyworth of mustard, cayenne and Worcestershire does the work that a fresh cut of meat would otherwise have to do. Worcestershire sauce, commercially bottled from the 1830s, became the standard shortcut ingredient in such mixtures on both sides of the Atlantic.