A satanic dinner on the fly from Time is of the Essence, including a detour through The Prawn Cocktail Years .

A dinner based on a devil that, remarkably enough in its original guise from 1961, a cook could prepare in half an hour provided she enjoyed a proclivity for planning and sported nerves of steel. Our version is a little better, takes a little longer but requires a lot less poise. The format of these recipes is atypical of bfia in presenting an entire dinner that should make even the least confident cook comfortable. Nothing exotic is required to build a dinner that twenty first century diners, particularly in the United States, may consider exotic indeed. A dinner for four.

For syllabub:

• 3 oz sugar
• juice and zest of a lemon
• 2 Tablespoons brandy
• 2 Tablespoons medium Sherry
• 10 oz heavy cream

For the devil:

• cayenne
• curry powder
• prepared English mustard (like Colman’s)
• a drip of neutral oil
• paprika
• black pepper
• soy sauce
• Worcestershire
• salt
• 4 whole chicken legs
• 4 slices good toast

For the starter:

• a pair of avocados, skinned, split, cored and sprinkled with lemon juice to impede browning
• another generous teaspoon lemon juice
• 1 teaspoon brandy
• hot sauce
• about 1/3 cup mayonnaise
• 1 Tablespoon ketchup ( see the Notes)
• minced parsley
• minced scallion greens
• enough cooked shrimp to overfill the avocado quarters

For the salad:

• good greens
• heavy cream
• hot sauce
• malt vinegar
• salt and pepper

The night before the dinner:

1. Combine all the ingredients for the syllabub and whip it with a hand mixer or rotary beater: “It should just hold its form when piled up.”
2. Divide the syllabub between four pretty glasses, cover each one with plastic wrap and refrigerate them overnight.
3. Combine all the constituents of the devil (other, of course, than the chicken and toast).
4. Make about four deep slashes in each piece of chicken and smear the devil all over the chicken, pushing it into the slashes. Refrigerate overnight.

On the day:

Preheat the oven to 425°.

5. Bake the chicken for about ten minutes on each side, starting out skin side down.
6. Meanwhile combine all the other ingredients for the starter except the shrimp, then fold them into the sauce you have just created and divide the result among the avocado halves.
7. Violently shake together the cream, hot sauce, vinegar and seasonings for the English Salad Cream.
8. Cook the toast.
9. Serve the starter and

Heat the broiler (‘grill’).

10. Blast the chicken skin side up in the broiler until slightly scorchy, usually in just a minute or so.
11. Meanwhile dress the salad and then serve it with the devils, which you have placed on the toast.
12. The syllabub, of course, goes last.

Notes:

The devil was a fixture on the eighteenth century table and at the Edwardian club. Its fall from grace is inexplicable.

Mrs. Ayrton specifies precooked chicken because her reader is in a rush and has neither whipped her syllabub nor devilled her chicken in advance and needs to get dinner ready in half an hour.

The original devil is simpler, but in this case more is more. We have added the oil, black pepper, soy and Worcestershire, and substituted English for the milder Dijon mustard; so should you.

Both the English Salad Cream and the sauce for the shrimp are adapted from The Prawn Cocktail Years by Simon Hopkinson and Lindsey Bareham, accurate enough accompaniments to keep the period piece ‘authentic’ and preferable to Mrs. Ayton’s incarnations. “However hard one tries,” as Hopkinson and Bareham observe, “it is not possible to replicate the taste of Heinz tomato ketchup. No other will do.” A creed for the ages.