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Flour (Cup hot stock Finely chopped)
Cup hot stock Finely chopped parsley Melt butter, and add Chili Sauce, Worcestershire Sauce, Walnut Catsup, mustard, and cayenne. Cut four small gashes in each piece of chicken. Sprinkle with salt and pepper, dredge with flour, and cook in the seasoned butter until well browned. Pour on stock, simmer five minutes, and sprinkle with chopped parsley.
This is a chafing-dish preparation printed with a truncated ingredient column, so the quantities for the butter, sauces, and mustard are missing from the text as it survives. The method is clear enough to work from, but you are building the seasoning by taste rather than by measure.
- What the missing column heldThe visible fragment leaves only "cup hot stock" and "finely chopped parsley"; the quantities for the butter, sauces, mustard and cayenne are lost. Devilled chicken sauces of this kind generally use a few tablespoons of butter with a spoonful or so each of the bottled sauces, a small quantity of mustard and a few grains of cayenne, but any figures given here are a modern reconstruction and not the book's own.
- Walnut catsupA spiced, thin, near-black condiment made from green walnuts and vinegar, once a pantry staple and now sold mainly by specialist grocers in Britain. Mushroom ketchup is the closest common substitute; a little anchovy paste thinned with vinegar gets you to the same salty-savoury place.
- The gashes matterFour small cuts in each piece let the seasoned butter reach the meat rather than sitting on the skin. Devilled dishes of this type depend on the mustard and cayenne penetrating; skip the slashing and the result is a spicy surface on plain chicken.
- Cooking throughFive minutes of simmering in stock will finish already-cooked chicken, and the short browning plus five-minute simmer suggests the recipe was written for cooked poultry, though the surviving text does not say so. Raw chicken needs to reach 165F internally, which this method will not achieve in the time given.
- Dry mustard, not preparedIn American recipes of this period a devilled sauce normally calls for dry mustard powder, though the fragment does not specify which is meant. Prepared jarred mustard brings vinegar and bulk that will loosen the butter sauce.
The chafing dish had a genuine vogue in American homes between roughly 1890 and 1910: it let a hostess cook at the table without servants, at a moment when middle-class households were losing their kitchen staff. Devilled preparations built on mustard, cayenne and a sharp bottled sauce were a standard way of using up cold cooked poultry. The bottled condiments named here — chili sauce, Worcestershire, walnut catsup — mark the recipe as belonging to a period when an American cook could assume a shelf of commercial flavourings. Walnut catsup is the oldest of the three, an English preparation going well back into the eighteenth century, and the one that largely fell out of use in American kitchens.