Broil slowly some chicken legs and when well done, dip them in English mustard diluted with mushroom catsup, salt, and cayenne, then roll them in bread-crumbs, and broil again over a slow fire until they acquire a fine color. Dress, pour lightly melted maitre d'hotel butter (No. 581) over, or else a deviled sauce (No. 459) into the bottom of the dish.
A two-stage broil: cook the legs through first, then coat and return them to the fire only long enough to set and color the crumbs. Ranhofer assumes a charcoal grill with a cool zone; a broiler or a grill with the heat pulled to one side does the same work.
"Deviling" — coating something in mustard, cayenne and crumbs and browning it hard — was a nineteenth-century Anglo-American habit, much used for second-day meat and for the tougher joints, and it goes some way to explaining why so many old books give the legs of a bird a separate treatment from the breast. Charles Ranhofer, chef of Delmonico's in New York, filled *The Epicurean* (1894) with these small economies of the professional kitchen: numbers 1873 through 1875 are three different ways to use chicken legs, presumably because the breasts were wanted elsewhere. The dish's title is French, and what *a l'Americaine* is doing here is not obvious — it seems to attach to the mustard-and-crumb devil rather than to any regional tradition. The mushroom catsup in the dip is a survival from the era before tomato ketchup took over the word: a salted mushroom liquor that English cooks used much as a modern kitchen uses soy sauce, for savory depth.