Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Deviled Leg of Goose
Deviled Leg of Goose
Remove all the water from a tablespoonful of fresh butter by beating it up with a little salt; add to it one saltspoonful each of dry mustard and white pepper, half a saltspoonful of dried salt and any kind of chutney, also a small quantity each of sugar and cayenne. Work these to a paste, spread it over the leg of a cold cooked goose so as to cover it, put it on a gridiron and broil both sides over a clear fire. Serve at once.
A leftover dish dressed up for service: a cold roast goose leg, coated in a mustard-cayenne butter and put over hot coals until the crust blisters. It takes minutes, and almost everything depends on the coating sticking and the fire being hot enough.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. So the paste is about 1 tablespoon butter, 1/4 teaspoon each dry mustard and white pepper, and, on the original's phrasing, half a saltspoonful (about 1/8 teaspoon) each of dried salt and chutney, with small quantities of sugar and cayenne.
- "Dried salt"Ambiguous in the original. Most likely plain table salt dried out in a warm oven so it would not weep into the butter. Ordinary fine salt does the job.
- Working the water out of the butterThis is the hinge. Butter is roughly 16 percent water, and that water makes the paste slide off under heat. Beat the softened butter hard against the side of a bowl with the salt and pour off what separates; the drier paste clings to the skin and browns instead of steaming.
- ChutneyThe recipe says 'any kind of chutney'; a sweet-sour Anglo-Indian mango chutney is the likeliest thing to have been at hand. Chop any large pieces of fruit fine or they will fall off the leg on the grill.
- Gridiron and clear fireA gridiron is a grate set over coals; a "clear fire" is one burned down past the smoke to steady red heat. A charcoal grill is the direct equivalent; a broiler about four inches from the element works, though it gives less of the smoky edge.
- Score the meatSome period devilling recipes call for cutting slashes in the meat before spreading the paste, so the seasoning reaches beyond the cold skin. This recipe omits it, but the dish is better for it.
- TimingThe goose is already cooked. Three to four minutes a side is enough to heat it through and crisp the coating; longer and the mustard butter scorches bitter and the leg dries out.
- ServingSent out immediately while the crust is still crackling, as the recipe directs.
To "devil" something was to make it hot with mustard and cayenne and brown it hard over fire — a term in English culinary use from the late eighteenth century onward, and usually traced to the idea of infernal heat. Devilled bones, devilled kidneys and devilled poultry legs belonged to the supper table and the club sideboard, eaten late after the theatre or at breakfast the morning after; they were often a way of using up the joints left from a large roast, the drumstick and thigh being the tougher, darker meat that carving had passed over. Oscar Tschirky kept the dish in the Waldorf repertoire. Goose was still a familiar festive bird in American kitchens at the turn of the century, before turkey came to dominate the holiday table; a devilled leg is what happened to it on the second day.