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Wet Devil
1 lb. cold cooked chicken or lamb 1 teaspoonful currant jelly 1½ teaspoonful made mustard 1 tablespoonful mushroom catchup 1/2 tablespoonfuls Worcestershire sauce 1 tablespoonful tomato catchup Chop the chicken or lamb, mix it with the currant jelly, mustard, catchup, and Worcestershire Heat thoroughly, and serve at once. sauce.
If highly seasoned foods are appreciated there is no reason why the dish known as "Wet Devil" should not be regarded with high favor.
A Victorian-Edwardian way of using up cold roast meat: chop, dress with a sharp sweet-hot mixture, heat through. The text has been garbled slightly in transcription — the stray "sauce." belongs to the sentence before it, and "1/2 tablespoonfuls Worcestershire" is almost certainly half a tablespoon.
- The hinge: heat, do not cookThe meat is already cooked, so the only job is bringing it up to serving temperature in the sauce. Held over heat for more than a few minutes, cold chicken or lamb turns dry and stringy; five minutes in a covered pan over low heat is plenty. Reheat it to steaming hot throughout, then serve immediately.
- Mushroom catchupNot a tomato product. Mushroom ketchup is a thin, dark, intensely savoury liquid made from salted mushrooms — still sold in Britain, and a reasonable substitute is a scant tablespoon of soy sauce or a mushroom-based Asian sauce with a drop of vinegar.
- Made mustard"Made" means mixed and ready, as opposed to dry mustard powder. Use prepared English or Dijon mustard; if you have only powder, mix it with a little cold water and let it stand ten minutes for the heat to develop.
- Currant jellyRed currant jelly, the standard British sweet accompaniment to lamb and game. Any tart jelly works, but avoid grape jelly, which is much sweeter and will unbalance the sauce.
- Sauce quantityAbout three tablespoons of liquid for a pound of chopped meat is a coating, not a gravy. If the pan looks dry as it heats, add a spoonful of stock rather than more sauce, or the seasoning becomes overwhelming.
- Chop, do not minceChopped meat in rough dice holds its texture; put it through a grinder or food processor and the dish collapses into a paste. Trim gristle and skin before chopping.
- Yield and servingA pound of meat will serve three or four as a light dish. Devilled dishes of this kind were commonly spooned onto hot buttered toast; rice or boiled potatoes would likewise soak up the sauce and temper the heat.
"Devilling" — dressing meat or fish with mustard, cayenne and sharp bottled sauces before grilling or reheating — was a fixture of English cookery from the late Georgian period onward, and the name is generally traced to the infernal heat of the seasoning rather than to any single cook or dish. Nineteenth-century writers distinguished a dry devil, where the paste was rubbed onto bones, chops or poultry legs and grilled until crusted, from a wet devil like this one, where the meat sits in a sauce. Both belonged to the same social slot: the supper tray after cards or the theatre, and the breakfast sideboard, where a devilled dish was the accepted way to make yesterday's joint interesting again. The reliance on bottled mushroom and tomato catchups and Worcestershire sauce places this version firmly after the mid-1800s, by which time such commercial condiments were increasingly available — the mild defensiveness of the closing line suggests the compiler expected some readers to find the whole idea too fierce.