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Devilled Sauce
Brown in a small saucepan in half an ounce of butter four good-sized sound and very finely hashed shallots. Add half teaspoon ground English mustard and one teaspoon flour. Mix well without cooking. Add four medium-sized, fine, red, crushed and strained tomatoes; mix well, season with a teaspoon salt, half saltspoon cayenne pepper, adding a teaspoon powdered sugar and a teaspoon Worcestershire sauce. Mix thoroughly and then allow to slowly boil for twelve minutes, stirring once in a while. When finished, add quarter of an ounce butter. Mix well again, without boiling, for a minute, and the same is ready.
A short, sharp tomato-and-mustard sauce built the way a professional garde-manger would have built it in 1900: aromatics, a whisper of flour, then acid and heat. The whole thing takes under twenty minutes.
- The hinge: the flour goes in off the heatThe hinge: the flour and mustard go in with the pan off the heat or barely warm — "Mix well without cooking" most naturally means not to let the mixture cook at this stage. Dry English mustard scorches fast and turns bitter, and the flour is there only to bind, not to make a roux.
- Weights and small measuresHalf an ounce of butter is one tablespoon; a quarter ounce is about one and a half teaspoons. A saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so "half saltspoon cayenne" is a scant eighth of a teaspoon — enough to bite without dominating.
- English mustardThis means dry powdered mustard of the Colman's type, not a prepared jarred mustard. Prepared English mustard already contains vinegar and would throw the acid balance off; if you substitute it, use about a teaspoon and cut back elsewhere.
- "Crushed and strained tomatoes"Four medium tomatoes pulped and pushed through a sieve to remove skin and seeds gives roughly a cup to a cup and a half of thin purée. Good passata is a reasonable modern equivalent; canned whole tomatoes crushed and sieved also work. Avoid tomato paste, which is far too concentrated for twelve minutes of open boiling.
- Four shallots is not a misprintShallots are the standard aromatic base for sauces of this type. Hash them as finely as the text says — nearly a mince — and cook them in the butter until soft and lightly coloured, not dark, or the finished sauce turns acrid.
- The twelve-minute boilKeep it at a lazy simmer with the pan uncovered. You are reducing the raw tomato to something glossy and coating; if it is still watery at twelve minutes, give it a few more rather than adding flour.
- Finishing butterThe last knob is a monter au beurre: stir it in off the heat until it emulsifies. Boiling afterwards splits the sauce and dulls the shine, which is why the recipe is explicit about it.
- Yield and useRoughly a cup, enough for about four servings. It is meant for devilled grilled meats — kidneys, chicken legs, chops, or leftover roast bones scored and broiled — and would be served hot, spooned over the meat.
"Devilled" appears in English cookery from the later eighteenth century for anything made hot with mustard, cayenne and pepper, and by the Victorian era devilling was firmly attached to the breakfast and supper table: devilled kidneys, devilled bones, devilled turkey legs made from the previous day's bird. The name is generally taken from the heat, and the practice owed much to thrift, since a fierce sauce made cold roast meat worth eating again. The shallot-and-butter base and the finishing butter are classical French practice, while the English mustard powder and Worcestershire sauce mark it as Anglo-French cooking. Worcestershire sauce, commercially established from the late 1830s, was by 1900 standard enough in professional kitchens that a recipe like this one calls for it without explanation.