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Meat
Cold mutton, chicken or other meat 1 tablespoon butter 1 teaspoon vinegar 1 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce 1/4 teaspoon mustard Dash of cayenne Make a sauce of the butter, vinegar and seasonings. Make cuts in the meat; rub the sauce into them; and grill in a hot chafing dish that has been rubbed with a little butter.
This is a devil — cold roast meat scored, rubbed with a sharp butter paste, and browned in the chafing dish. The whole point is speed: the meat is already cooked, so it wants colour and heat, not cooking.
- The hinge: heat the pan hard firstThe blazer must be set directly over the flame with the water pan removed, and it must be properly hot before the meat goes in. A lukewarm chafing dish will steam the meat grey and leach out its juices instead of searing the sauce onto it.
- Quantity of meatThe original gives no weight. The sauce as written — 1 tablespoon butter and the seasonings — will coat roughly 3/4 to 1 lb of sliced cold meat, which serves two. Scale the sauce up in proportion rather than stretching it.
- "Mustard" means dry mustardIn a book of this period an unqualified teaspoon or fraction of mustard is usually powdered mustard rather than prepared. If you substitute jarred Dijon, use about three times as much and expect a milder, more acidic result.
- Cut thick, then scoreThe recipe does not say how the meat is cut. Pieces or slices about half an inch thick hold the paste best; thin deli-style slices have nowhere to hold it. Score the surface in a shallow diamond pattern, no more than a third of the way through, and press the butter mixture in with the back of a spoon.
- VinegarA plain cider or malt vinegar suits the recipe. Wine vinegars are fine; balsamic is not, as its sugar will scorch in a dry hot pan.
- TimingTwo to three minutes a side is enough — long enough to brown the paste and heat the meat through. Cold cooked meat should reach steaming hot at the centre; past that it dries and toughens, mutton especially.
- ServingDevils were often served straight from the blazer onto toast, with the pan scrapings poured over. A little more butter swirled in off the heat at the end pulls the residue into a sauce.
The devil — meat scored, spread with mustard, cayenne and something acid, then grilled — was a fixture of English and American cooking from the early nineteenth century onward, and the name is generally traced simply to the heat of the seasoning. Its practical purpose was the reuse of the Sunday joint: cold mutton or chicken in quantity, and a household disinclined to serve it cold twice. That it appears here under chafing-dish cookery places it in a particular moment. The chafing dish had a long vogue in American middle-class homes around 1900, when it was the equipment of choice for late suppers, after-theatre snacks and cooking done at the table rather than in the kitchen by a servant. Mrs. Fryer's loose-leaf format, with pages meant to be pulled and rearranged, belongs to the same era of confident domestic-science publishing, and the recipe's brevity assumes a reader who already knows how to manage a spirit lamp.