Home › Chafing-Dish Dainties › Devilled Dishes
Devilled Dishes
Season any of the creamed dishes highly with cayenne, onion juice, mustard, and Worcestershire or other sauce.
This is less a recipe than a formula: take any of the creamed dishes in the chafing-dish chapter and push the seasoning until it bites. A few notes make it workable at a modern stove.
- What "creamed dishes" means hereThese would have been dishes bound in a thin white sauce — something on the order of 2 tablespoons butter, 2 tablespoons flour and a cup of milk or cream — with cooked chicken, lobster, crab, sweetbreads, eggs or mushrooms folded in. Anything you would serve on toast qualifies.
- Season off the heat, at the endWorcestershire and mustard both dull and turn slightly bitter with prolonged cooking, and cayenne's heat keeps blooming. Stir them in once the sauce has thickened and the meat is hot through, then taste before adding more.
- How much "highly" isFor a cup of creamed mixture serving two, start with 1/8 teaspoon cayenne, 1/2 teaspoon dry mustard, 1 teaspoon Worcestershire and 1/2 teaspoon onion juice. Devilled should sting on the finish; it should not obliterate the lobster.
- Onion juiceGrate half a small onion on the fine side of a box grater and press the pulp in a sieve, or pulse onion and strain. It gives sharpness without the texture or the raw-onion crunch that would be wrong in a smooth sauce.
- MustardDry mustard (Colman's-type English powder) is the most likely reading, and was the usual choice in period devilled dishes. If you use prepared mustard instead, add it at the very end — its vinegar can make a cream sauce grainy if it sits over heat.
- The chafing dish itselfIf you are working in a chafing dish, it has a blazer that sits either directly over the flame or in a hot-water pan. Cream sauces belong over the water pan, which holds the mixture below the boil and prevents the scorching and curdling that direct flame causes.
- ServingA cup to a cup and a half of devilled mixture serves two on buttered toast points, or stretches to four in pastry shells or on crackers as a savoury. Make it to order; reheated cream sauces separate.
"Devilled" enters English cookery in the late eighteenth century and by the nineteenth means any dish made aggressively hot with cayenne, mustard and a bottled sauce — the infernal heat being, by the traditional explanation, the joke in the name. The devilled bones and devilled kidneys of English club and supper tables were late-night food, and that is exactly the niche the chafing dish filled in American homes around 1900: a spirit-lamp burner and a copper pan let a hostess cook at the table after the theatre, without a servant or a lit kitchen range. Worcestershire, commercially bottled by Lea & Perrins from 1837 and a fixture in American pantries by the time this book appeared, was the standard shortcut to that flavor, which is why a chafing-dish recipe can be reduced to a single line telling the cook to take anything creamy and make it fierce.