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Scotch Woodcock
Make a batter of cold milk and one and one-half tablespoons of flour, adding one-half teaspoon of salt; melt one and one-half tablespoons of butter and mix with the batter; heat one cup of milk, stir the batter in and cook until it thickens; chop four hard-boiled eggs and put in the thickened milk; add a pinch of cayenne pepper and a small tablespoon of Worcestershire sauce. Serve on saltines or toas
— Miss H. May Ford
A 4126a. Dutch Reformed Church, Catskill, N. Q.
A 4121 Summit Hill House, Catskill, N. 2.
A thin egg-and-cream-sauce savoury, closer to creamed eggs than to the anchovy-on-toast dish the name usually denotes. It comes together in about ten minutes and needs watching only at the thickening stage.
- The unmeasured milkThe "batter of cold milk" gives no quantity. Use just enough cold milk to make a smooth pourable slurry with the 1 1/2 tablespoons flour — roughly 2 to 3 tablespoons — and count it as part of the liquid, not in addition to the cup that is heated.
- Sauce thicknessOne and a half tablespoons of flour to a cup of milk gives a thinner sauce than the usual two tablespoons per cup, and the chopped egg bulks it out. If you want it to sit on a cracker rather than run off, go to a full two tablespoons.
- Order of operationsWhisking the melted butter into the cold flour-and-milk slurry, then stirring that into hot milk, is a slurry method rather than a roux. It works, but the flour is uncooked going in, so let the sauce simmer two or three minutes after it thickens to lose the raw taste.
- Cayenne and WorcestershireThese carry the whole dish. A "small tablespoon" of Worcestershire is a generous but correct amount here; add it off the heat so the sauce keeps its sharpness, and taste before adding more salt, since Worcestershire is already salty.
- Hard-boiled eggsChop them coarsely and fold them in at the last moment over low heat. Held in a simmering sauce they turn rubbery and the yolks go chalky.
- Saltines or toastAssemble at the table. The sauce is loose enough to soften a cracker quickly, so spoon it over just before serving.
- YieldFour hard-boiled eggs in a cup of sauce makes enough for four small savoury portions, or two as a light supper on toast.
Scotch woodcock is one of the mock-game savouries — like Welsh rabbit, the name promises a bird that never appears, and the joke is often said to be that a modest dish of eggs stands in for something shot. The classic English club and dining-room version is scrambled egg spread on toast that has been buttered with anchovy paste, served at the end of dinner as a savoury course; the version here drops the anchovy entirely and substitutes Worcestershire sauce, which supplied a similar salty, fermented-fish depth. Its appearance in a Catskill collection, credited to a named parishioner, a church, and Summit Hill House, shows how thoroughly the English savoury had been absorbed into small-town American cooking, translated into ingredients any village grocer stocked: milk, flour, butter, eggs, cayenne, a bottle of Worcestershire, and a box of saltines.