Generally this dish is prepared with pullets' legs already cooked and then broiled, but raw ones can also be used. Score and season well-pepper should predominate-then roll them in mustard diluted with oil; besprinkle with bread-crumbs and broil on a slow fire, turning them over. Serve with a deviled sauce (No. 459).
Ranhofer's deviling is a way of using up cooked poultry legs, though he allows raw ones. The whole technique rests on gentle heat: the mustard-and-crumb coating scorches long before the meat inside is done.
Deviling -- coating meat with mustard and cayenne and browning it hard -- was an English tavern and supper-room habit, and the name is often said to point to the heat of the mustard and pepper rather than any particular sauce. Charles Ranhofer, chef at Delmonico's in New York, published The Epicurean in 1894 as a working reference for that trade, and the recipe's own line that it is generally prepared with pullets' legs already cooked suggests a use-up purpose: a kitchen carving breasts had a use for the legs. The same logic accounts for deviled bones, deviled kidneys and deviled crab, all of them ways of dressing up the parts nobody had ordered.