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Devilled Butter
Half an ounce good butter, two saltspoons ground English mustard, one teaspoon good white wine vinegar, one teaspoon Worcestershire sauce, one saltspoon salt, half a saltspoon cayenne pepper and one egg yolk. Place all these articles in a bowl, thoroughly mix well together with a spoon and use as required.
A compound butter in the old devilling tradition, meant to be worked into hot grilled meat rather than served cold on bread. Two things need attention: the quantities are tiny and unbalanced by modern taste, and the raw yolk has to be handled with care.
- SaltspoonsA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. So the recipe calls for about 1/2 teaspoon dry mustard, 1/4 teaspoon salt and a scant 1/8 teaspoon cayenne.
- Half an ounce of butterThat is one tablespoon, which will not absorb an entire egg yolk without slackening into a sauce. Multiply the butter by four to six for a proper spreadable devilled butter, or accept that this makes a loose devil sauce and use it as one.
- Ground English mustardDry mustard powder, not prepared mustard from a jar. English powder is markedly hotter than yellow ballpark mustard; mixed with liquid it takes a few minutes to develop its pungency, though vinegar tends to hold that heat back rather than draw it out, and the pungency fades if the mixture stands for hours.
- Getting it smoothThe butter is easier to work if soft but not melted, with the yolk beaten in last, a little at a time, after the mustard, vinegar and sauce are already worked into it -- though the original just says to put everything in a bowl and mix with a spoon. Melted butter makes the yolk harder to bring together smoothly.
- Raw yolkNothing here is cooked. If the butter is going onto meat straight off the grill it will get some heat, but if you plan to eat it cold, use a pasteurised egg, and keep it refrigerated and use it within a day. Skip it entirely for anyone pregnant, elderly or immune-compromised.
- Heat levelAn eighth of a teaspoon of cayenne against a tablespoon of butter is aggressive by design. Devils were supposed to sting; taste before scaling up and adjust rather than assuming the proportion is a typo.
- Yield and useAs written, enough for one or two chops, kidneys or a single grilled bird. Spread it on the meat in the last minute of grilling, or drop a knob on the hot plate at the table so it melts into the juices.
"Devilled" was in use in English cookery by the late eighteenth century and was common through the nineteenth for anything made fiercely hot with mustard, cayenne and a sharp bottled sauce, usually applied to leftover roast meat or to the bones and trimmings of yesterday's joint. Devilled bones and devilled kidneys were staples of the late supper and the gentleman's club sideboard, dishes designed to be pungent enough to stand up to port. The technique also had a practical logic: mustard and cayenne mask the flat taste of cooked meat that has sat overnight. Worcestershire sauce, commercially available from the later 1830s, became a near-inevitable third element, and its presence here places this version in the industrial-condiment era rather than in any older tradition of spicing.