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Broiled Devilled Spareribs
Procure six very fresh spareribs, evenly season them all around with a teaspoon salt and half teaspoon pepper, lightly rub with a little oil, arrange on a broiler and slowly broil for ten minutes on each side. Remove, evenly spread a devilled butter on both sides of them, then roll in bread crumbs, replace on broiler, briskly broil for two minutes on each side, dress on a hot dish and serve with a Robert sauce separately.
A gridiron recipe from the era when "broil" meant over coals rather than under a gas flame. Two things need translating: the two compound preparations it assumes you already have, and the fact that the crumb coating goes on at the very end and burns in seconds.
- What "six spareribs" meansAlmost certainly not six racks, but six individual ribs cut from the sheet, or short two-rib pieces. On that reading it would serve as a first course or a light main for a few people.
- Devilled butterAn unsweetened compound butter of a kind common in kitchens of this period. A workable version: soften about 4 oz butter and work in mustard (Dijon or dry English), cayenne, a little Worcestershire, salt and lemon juice. Keep it firm enough to spread rather than run off the hot meat.
- Robert sauceThe classic brown mustard-and-onion sauce: onions sweated in butter, deglazed with white wine and vinegar, reduced with demi-glace, finished off the heat with mustard so it does not turn bitter. A jarred demi-glace base makes it manageable.
- The heat, translated"Slowly broil" meant a moderate coal fire with the grate set high. On a gas grill use medium indirect heat, or in the oven a rack over a sheet pan at 375F, turning once. Save the actual broiler element for the final crumb stage.
- Time and temperatureTen minutes a side will not reliably cook meaty modern spareribs through. Cook to at least 145F, taking the reading in the thickest meat without touching the bone, and allow a rest; ribs with more meat on them may want a low oven first and the grill only for colour.
- The crumb stage is the hingeTwo minutes a side under a fierce heat is all the crumbs get, and dry breadcrumbs over butter scorch almost instantly. Stand at the oven and pull them the moment they are golden.
- Serving"Separately" means the sauce goes in a boat, not over the ribs — pouring it on would soften the crust the last step existed to create.
"Devilling" — coating meat with mustard, cayenne and butter and finishing it over a fierce heat — was an English chophouse and supper-room habit that French-trained hotel kitchens absorbed in the nineteenth century, and it was especially useful for cooked or leftover meat that needed reviving. This version pairs it with sauce Robert, one of the oldest named sauces in French cookery, mentioned by Rabelais and generally traced to a cook of that name; its mustard echoes the devilled butter, which is why the two are so often served together. The book's author, Alexander Filippini, spent decades at Delmonico's in New York, and the recipe shows the house style: a plain grilled cut, a compound butter, a crumb finish and a classical sauce sent to the table on its own. The instruction to broil over a slow fire and then briskly is a coal-range direction, from the days when a cook controlled heat by moving the grate rather than turning a dial.