Home › To Devil Chicken › To Devil Chicken (With two or three slices)
To Devil Chicken (With two or three slices)
with two or three slices of cold smoked tongue or ham, and some button mushrooms or oysters; add nutmeg and mace, and put the whole in a stewpan, thicken with flour and butter, and add sufficient cream, to moisten it well, let it stew ten minutes then serve in a deep dish or with a wall of potatoes.
What survives here is the finishing stage: cooked chicken enriched with cured meat and mushrooms or oysters, bound in a cream sauce and served in a dish or inside a potato border. It is a supper dish built on cold roast fowl, and the timings need adjusting for the two ingredients that suffer most.
- Oysters go in lastTen minutes of stewing turns oysters to rubber. If you use them rather than mushrooms, slip them in for the final minute or two, off a hard boil, just until the edges ruffle.
- The devilling itselfNothing in this passage is actually hot. Victorian devilling meant mustard, cayenne, black pepper and often a dash of Worcestershire or anchovy worked into the meat before it went in the pan; season assertively or the dish is simply a cream stew.
- StewpanA plain lidded saucepan or sauteuse, not a baked casserole. Anything wide and heavy enough to hold the pieces in one layer will do.
- Thicken with flour and butterEqual weights kneaded cold into a paste and whisked in — beurre manie — about 15 g of each per 250 ml of liquid. Let it cook a couple of minutes so the flour loses its raw taste.
- MaceBlade mace, the outer coating of nutmeg, is warmer and less sweet than the nut. A pinch of ground mace substitutes; use both spices with restraint, since they are meant to sit under the cream rather than over it.
- Smoked tongueCold pressed tongue is a specialist purchase now. Two or three slices of good cooked ham, cut into short strips, gives the same salty counterweight.
- A wall of potatoesThe recipe says no more than that: a border of potato raised round the dish to hold the sauce. Stiff mashed potato, if you like bound with egg yolk and piped, is the usual modern way of doing it, and it can be browned under a hot grill, though the original calls for neither.
- YieldThe meat from one roast chicken, treated this way, serves three or four with the potato border; keep the cream to roughly 200-250 ml so the sauce coats rather than floods.