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Deviled Turkey's Legs
Cut and trim the legs of a cold cooked turkey and season them well with salt and pepper. Mix a small quantity of mustard to a paste with some oil, rub the legs in it and broil them over a clear fire, turning and basting often. When nicely colored put the legs on a hot dish, pour a little rich brown gravy over them, and serve.
A leftover dish built for the broiler, and one of the most useful things to do with turkey legs, which dry out badly if simply reheated. The whole point is a mustard-oil coating that browns and crisps without the meat drying.
- "Devil" means mustard and pepperOscar's version is restrained: salt, pepper, mustard thinned with oil. If you want the heat the name implies, add cayenne or a dash of Worcestershire to the mustard paste. Use a sharp English or Dijon mustard rather than a sweet yellow one.
- Score the legs firstCut two or three slashes through the skin on each drumstick. The seasoning gets inside, and the heat reaches the centre before the outside blackens; the object is only to colour and warm through.
- "A clear fire" means no flame and no smokeCharcoal burned down to an even glow, or a gas grill on medium-high, or an oven broiler with the rack six inches from the element. Direct flame on an oil-coated leg will flare.
- TimingThe turkey is already cooked. Eight to twelve minutes total, turned every few minutes, is enough to crisp the skin and heat the meat. Longer and the leg meat turns stringy.
- BastingBaste with more of the mustard oil, or with melted butter. A silicone brush is easier than the original's spoon, and the coating tends to slide off unless it is reapplied at each turn.
- The brown gravyLeftover turkey gravy, or pan drippings loosened with stock. It should be thin enough to pour and no more it is a moistening, not a sauce the legs sit in. Warm the platter; cold china kills the dish.
- YieldTwo legs from an average turkey serve two as a main course with something starchy, or four as a first course if the meat is pulled off the bone.
Devilling was the standard Victorian and Edwardian answer to cold cooked meat: mustard, pepper and fire, applied to whatever came off the sideboard the day after a large dinner. Turkey legs were the natural candidate in a period when the breast was carved for the table and the darker, tougher joints were sent back to the kitchen oa hotel like the Waldorf would have had them in quantity. Oscar Tschirky ran the dining rooms rather than the ranges, and his 1896 Cook Book collects the working repertoire of the hotel's kitchens, thrift included. The term is generally traced to eighteenth-century English usage, in which spiced, fiery treatment of a dish took on the name; by the 1890s devilled bones and devilled kidneys were fixtures of the supper and breakfast menu on both sides of the Atlantic.