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Grilled Turkey Legs
Score the legs of a cold turkey in deep gashes and rub thoroughly with melted butter, salt, pepper, a little mustard and cayenne; broil over a clear fire, and serve with a brown sauce, to which is added a little mustard and Worcestershire.
This is a devilled leftover dish: the legs come from a turkey already roasted, so the grilling is about crust and heat, not cooking through. The whole point is the scoring, which lets the seasoning paste reach the meat.
- Start with cooked meat"Cold turkey" means the remains of a roast bird, not raw legs. Raw drumsticks and thighs will not cook through under a broiler in the time this method allows.
- Score deeplyCut through the skin and well into the meat; deep, undercut gashes hold the butter and mustard, where a shallow scratch does nothing. The recipe specifies only "deep gashes" and leaves spacing and angle to the cook.
- The seasoning pasteThe recipe gives no quantities. Work melted butter (roughly 2 tablespoons per leg is enough) with a little prepared mustard, a pinch of salt and black pepper, and cayenne on the tip of a knife. Press it into the cuts with your fingers rather than brushing it on.
- "A clear fire"A charcoal bed burned down past the flames to even grey coals, or a gas grill on medium-high. Under a domestic broiler, put the rack 4 to 5 inches from the element.
- TimingSix to ten minutes total, turned two or three times, until the edges of the gashes are brown and crisp and the meat is hot at the bone. Longer only dries out meat that is already cooked.
- The brown sauceA period brown sauce is a roux-based gravy or espagnole, not the bottled British condiment of the same name. Pan gravy from the roast, thinned and reduced, does the job; whisk in a teaspoon of mustard and a splash of Worcestershire off the heat so the mustard keeps its bite.
- YieldOne leg per person as a light main course, or split thighs and drumsticks to serve four as a savoury course or lunch dish.
Grilling and devilling the legs was, by many accounts, a common way to handle the second day of a roast bird. The breast was often carved for the table hot; the legs, darker and coarser in texture, were held back and treated with mustard, cayenne and Worcestershire, a combination Victorian and Edwardian cooks called "devilled" and applied to bones, kidneys, biscuits and cold poultry alike. Worcestershire sauce, commercially bottled by Lea & Perrins from the late 1830s, had become the household shorthand for savoury sharpness and turns up throughout books of this vintage. The recipe belongs to a tradition of planned leftovers rather than thrift born of hardship: a large turkey was expected to yield several meals, each dressed differently enough to look like a new dish.