Devilled Biscuits
INGREDIENTS for dish for 6 persons.-8 milk biscuits, 1½ oz. of butter, cayenne and salt. AVERAGE COST, 3d.
Butter the biscuits well on both sides, seasoning with cayenne and a little salt, and put them in a tin in the oven to get thoroughly hot.
SEASONABLE at any time.
A savoury of the plainest kind: crackers, butter, cayenne, heat. The whole thing rests on getting them hot without letting the butter scorch.
- The stray word "PINE"A fragment carried over from the surrounding text of the original book, most likely the tail of a neighbouring entry ("PINE-APPLE" or similar) or a catchword. It is not an ingredient and nothing pine-flavoured belongs here.
- Milk biscuitsNot a sweet cookie. A Victorian milk biscuit was a plain, hard, at most faintly sweet table cracker; the closest modern equivalents are water biscuits, cream crackers or similar plain crackers. Avoid anything sugared.
- Butter quantity1½ oz is about 3 tablespoons for 8 biscuits, which is generous. Soften it to spreading consistency rather than melting it, or it will run off before it goes into the oven.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given; the book, like most of its period, does not state oven temperatures at all. A moderate oven, around 350°F, for roughly 4 to 6 minutes will do -- the point is "thoroughly hot", not browned. Butter on a thin cracker burns quickly, so watch them rather than trusting a timer.
- CayenneThe strength of nineteenth-century cayenne was inconsistent and not directly comparable with modern ground cayenne. Start with a scant pinch per biscuit; the dish is meant to bite, but two of these should not close the throat.
- ServingServe immediately, straight from the tin to a hot plate. They lose the point of the exercise within a few minutes and go soft as the butter cools.
- Yield in contextEight biscuits for six people works out at rather less than one each: a mouthful at the end of a long meal, not a snack plate. Scale up freely if serving with drinks.
Devilled biscuits belong to the savoury, the small hot salty course served after the sweet and before dessert fruit in a formal Victorian and Edwardian dinner, and eaten with the last of the wine. "Devilled" in nineteenth-century English cookery simply meant treated with something fiercely hot — cayenne, mustard, sometimes anchovy — and it was applied to bones, kidneys, crab, and here to nothing more than a buttered cracker. That such a trifle earned an entry, with a costing of threepence, says a good deal about the book it sits in: Mrs Beeton's household manuals were written for mistresses running a modest staff on an accounted budget, and a savoury that could be produced in five minutes from the store cupboard was exactly the kind of item worth writing down. The cost line is a reminder that the original Book of Household Management (1861) priced almost every dish, and later compilations such as this one carried the practice forward.