Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Deviled Chicken
Deviled Chicken
Make a mixture of cayenne, salt, mustard, grated lemon peel, lemon juice, sherry wine, and Worcestershire sauce, or any other except anchovy. Cut off some slices of cooked chicken, butter, lay them in the mixture and let them soak for some time. Put sauce and all into a saucepan over the fire. Do not let it boil, and serve very hot.
A leftovers dish written in the shorthand of a professional kitchen: no quantities, no timings, and an assumption that the cook can taste and adjust. A workable starting point for the devil mixture is given below.
- Proportions to start fromFor about a pound of sliced cooked chicken: 2 tsp Dijon or English mustard, 2 tbsp sherry, 1 tbsp Worcestershire, the grated zest and juice of half a lemon, 1/2 tsp salt, cayenne to taste (start at 1/8 tsp). Adjust the cayenne upward once you have tasted it warm.
- "Or any other except anchovy"The instruction points to any bottled sauce of the Worcestershire family — Harvey's, mushroom ketchup and the like — but not anchovy essence, a common pantry item then, which would push the dish toward fish. Worcestershire itself contains anchovy in small amounts, so the exclusion is presumably about pronounced anchovy sauces rather than trace amounts.
- "Slices of cooked chicken, butter"The comma is doing heavy work. Butter the slices — smear them lightly with softened butter — then lay them in the marinade. Some readings take it as adding butter to the mixture; either produces a passable result, but buttered slices reheat more gently.
- "Soak for some time"Thirty minutes at room temperature, or two to three hours refrigerated. Much longer and the lemon juice and mustard can begin to soften the surface of the meat unpleasantly.
- Do not let it boilThis is the hinge. The sauce is barely thickened and mostly acid and wine; a boil will curdle the butter out of it and squeeze the already-cooked chicken dry. Hold it just below a simmer, moving the pan, until the meat is heated through — a few minutes.
- Reheating cooked poultryGentle does not mean tepid. Bring the chicken to 165F/74C throughout, which is easily reached well below boiling, and serve immediately rather than holding it warm.
- Yield and servingOn the pound of chicken assumed above, enough for three or four as a light lunch or supper dish. The recipe specifies no accompaniment; toast, rice or plain boiled potato will absorb the thin sauce.
Devilling — coating meat with mustard, cayenne and something sharp, then heating it hard — was a British breakfast and supper habit that carried over into American hotel cookery, and the name is generally traced to the eighteenth-century use of "devil" for anything fiery. Its practical purpose was to make yesterday's roast fowl worth serving again, which is why devilled dishes tend to appear in the chafing-dish and supper chapters of period books rather than among the roasts. Oscar Tschirky, maitre d'hotel of the Waldorf and later the Waldorf-Astoria, published his cook book in 1896, and entries like this one read as notes to a cook rather than instructions to a novice: the quantities are left to judgment. The sherry-and-Worcestershire register is characteristic of American hotel cookery of the 1890s, when devilled chicken and devilled kidneys were common supper-dish fare.