Devils on Horseback

Use soft, plump prunes - dried-out ones are difficult to stuff. Quality blue cheese makes a difference. The honey drizzle is non-traditional but delicious.

Devils on horseback belong to a specifically Victorian category of British dining called the savoury: a small, intensely flavoured hot dish served after dessert and before digestifs, designed to cleanse the palate and settle the stomach for the drinks to come. The Oxford English Dictionary records the name in print as early as 1885, in the American agricultural magazine The Country Gentleman, and suggests the dish is "probably so called on account of being typically served very hot." The dish was created as a companion and contrast to Angels on Horseback — bacon-wrapped oysters whose name may derive from the French anges à cheval. A 1896 New York Times article credited Angels on Horseback to Urbain Dubois, the celebrated chef of Kaiser Wilhelm II, though the dish was popular in Britain by the time that attribution appeared. Where angels used oysters (then cheap and plentiful in Victorian London), devils substituted dried fruit — prunes or dates — providing a similar bacon-wrapped format with a darker, sweeter, more "devilish" character. The prunes were often steeped in tea or brandy before being wrapped; some recipes called for cayenne pepper to double down on the name. Stuffing the prunes with cheese, almonds, or chutney is a later elaboration. The dish crossed to the United States in the 20th century, gaining particular traction during the cocktail party culture of the 1960s and 1970s when Americans embraced British-style canapés and an enduring love of bacon-wrapped anything.