Turkey, Devilled
INGREDIENTS for dish for 4 or 5 persons.-2 turkeys' legs, made mustard, pepper, salt and cayenne.
Score the legs in regular lines in deep gashes, both along and across, pepper and salt them, adding cayenne, if liked very hot; cover them with made mustard, and leave till the following morning, if for a breakfast dish. Grill the legs over a clear, bright fire till the outside is crisp and brown. Place small pieces of butter over, and serve quickly.
TIME.-7 minutes to grill.
SEASONABLE in winter.
Turkey, Fricasséed. (Cold Meat Cookery.)-INGREDIENTS.-The he remains rema of cold roast or boiled turkey; a strip of lemon-peel, a bunch of savoury herbs, 1 onion, pepper and salt to taste, 1 pint of water, 4 tablespoonfuls of cream, the yolk of TURKEY, ROAST. an egg. AVERAGE COST, exclusive of the cold turkey, 6d.
Cut some nice slices from the remains of a cold turkey, and put the bones and trimmings into a stewpan, with the lemonpeel, herbs, onion, pepper, salt and the water; stew for an hour, strain the gravy and lay in the pieces of turkey. When warm through, add the cream and the yolk of an egg; stir it well round, and, when getting thick, take out the pieces, lay them on a hot dish and pour the sauce over.
Garnish the fricassée with sippets of toasted bread. Celery or cucumbers, cut into small pieces, may be put into the sauce; if the former, it must be boiled first.
TIME.-1 hour to make the gravy.
SEASONABLE from December to February.
Two ways with turkey, both built for the Victorian larder: a devilled breakfast dish made from the legs, and a fricassée that recycles Sunday's roast. Neither needs much translation, but a few of Mrs Beeton's assumptions do.
- The hinge: the legs should already be cookedThe hinge: the legs are probably already cooked -- Seven minutes over a fire will not bring a raw turkey drumstick to a safe 165F/74C in the centre. The recipe does not say so (unlike the fricassee, it carries no "Cold Meat Cookery" heading), but devilling was usually leftover cookery and the timing only makes sense with legs from a bird already roasted or boiled. Use cooked legs, grill only to crisp and heat through, and check the centre if the joints are thick.
- "Made mustard"Mustard already mixed with liquid, as opposed to the dry powder sold by weight. English mustard from a jar is the direct equivalent; a spoonful of Colman's powder slaked with cold water is closer still to what a Victorian kitchen would have had standing.
- GrillingA "clear, bright fire" means coals burned down past the flames, or in a modern kitchen a broiler preheated fully with the rack close to the element. The scored gashes are the point: they let the mustard paste reach into the meat and give edges that char.
- Overnight seasoning"Leave till the following morning" meant a cool larder. Refrigerate, covered, and let the legs sit at room temperature for twenty minutes or so before they go under the heat.
- The fricassée gravyA pint here is the imperial pint, 20 fl oz, so a scant 2 1/2 US cups. An hour's simmer on the bones and trimmings gives a light stock rather than a thick sauce; reduce it if you want body before the cream goes in.
- Egg yolk and creamOnce the yolk is stirred in the sauce must not boil, or it will scramble into threads. Hold it just below a simmer and pull the pan the moment it coats a spoon.
- SippetsSmall triangles or fingers of toasted bread, arranged round the edge of the dish. They do the job croutons do now, soaking up the sauce.
- YieldThe devilled legs are stated as serving four or five, which is generous for two legs unless they are large birds' and served with toast; three is more realistic. The fricassée depends entirely on how much cold turkey you have.
Devilling is a British answer to the problem of cold meat: score it, coat it in something fierce, and put it back over the fire. The word appears in this culinary sense from the later eighteenth century, the "devil" being, by the traditional gloss, the heat of mustard and cayenne, and the technique attached itself particularly to poultry legs and bones, which were dark, sinewy and less prized than the breast. Beeton files it as a breakfast dish, which tells you how substantial a Victorian breakfast could be, and the instruction to leave the mustard on overnight fits a household where Christmas or a winter dinner party left a large carcass to be worked through over several days. The fricass e on the following entry belongs to the same economy, appearing under her heading "Cold Meat Cookery" -- a whole category in the book, and a fair measure of how seriously a nineteenth-century mistress of a house was expected to take waste.