Boil eggs until hard; remove the shells. Cut out the centres lengthwise; then chop cooked chicken to a fine mince; add the yolk of a raw egg and mix with cream. Season to taste with salt and pepper. Fill the eggs and dip them in beaten eggs and fine bread-crumbs and fry a light brown. Serve hot with cream sauce. Garnish with parsley.
A shallow-fried cousin of the sausage-wrapped Scotch egg, built on hard-boiled halves rather than whole eggs. The original leaves several things unsaid, chief among them what to do with the cooked yolks.
- The hinge: a filling stiff enough to stay inAdd cream a teaspoon at a time. The mince needs to be barely moist and thick enough to mound; anything looser will slump out in the fat and the raw yolk will not hold it together in time.
- "Cut out the centres lengthwise"Halve the peeled eggs the long way and lift out the cooked yolks. The recipe never mentions them again; mashing them into the chicken mince is a reasonable reading and improves both texture and flavour.
- Chop cooked chicken to a fine minceAbout 1 cup of picked meat from poached or roast chicken, thigh preferably, chopped by hand to a coarse paste. A food processor turns it to a gluey purée in seconds, so pulse if you use one at all.
- Frying temperature and depthShallow-fry in about half an inch of fat at 350–360F. Hotter and the crumbs colour before the raw yolk in the filling sets; cooler and the coating soaks. Two to three minutes a side, filling face down first.
- Chill before breadingNot in the original, but the assembled halves hold their shape far better after 20 minutes in the refrigerator. Bread them a second time if the first coat looks thin.
- Cream sauceA period cream sauce is a white roux — 2 tablespoons butter, 2 tablespoons flour, a cup of milk or thin cream, salt, a scrape of nutmeg — simmered until it coats a spoon. Keep it loose; it thickens as it sits.
- YieldThe original gives no quantities; working with six eggs gives twelve halves, enough for four as a first course or two as a light supper with the sauce and a salad.
Titles like this one — "Scotch," "English Salad," "Oriental Vegetable Curry" on consecutive days — tell you more about the book's format than about Scotland. The book belongs to a genre of daily-menu compilations, which promised the harried housekeeper one answer to the question of what to serve, every day of the year, dressed up with the glamour of foreign names. The national labels were applied loosely: what makes this dish "Scotch" is its family resemblance to the Scotch egg, a hard-boiled egg cased in forcemeat, crumbed and fried, whose origins are contested and whose name has been explained in several competing ways. Stuffing egg halves with a minced meat farce and frying them was a thrifty way to stretch leftover chicken into something that read as a made dish, and cream sauce over fried food was the standard finish of the era's respectable table.