Use the spare bones of a piece of a cold roast rib of beef. Take out the bones without removing too much of the meat around them, then season with salt and pepper, rubbing the surface over with mustard. Roll them in fresh bread raspings, drop some butter over, and broil on a slow fire; lay them on a dish, pouring over a little thickened gravy (No. 405).
This is a leftovers dish: the bones from a standing rib roast, still carrying meat, crusted and grilled. The hinge is the low heat — the meat is already cooked, so the fire only needs to crisp the crumb coating and warm the ribs through.
"A la diable" — devilled — meant, through the nineteenth century, anything mustarded, peppered and browned over fire, and it was often applied to leftovers: cold turkey legs, cold kidneys, cold bones. Charles Ranhofer's The Epicurean (1894) records the kitchen of Delmonico's in New York; devilling picked-over bones was how a luxury kitchen turned yesterday's carving into today's grill order. Devilled bones were long familiar in English cookery too, on a smaller domestic scale.