Scotch Eggs
Cook six eggs hard and at the same time keep them tender by leaving in hot water just below the boiling point for one-half hour; cool and remove the shells. Cook to a paste one-third of a cup of bread crumbs in one-third of a cup of milk and add one cup of deviled ham and one raw egg. Cover the eggs with the mixture, roll in crumbs and fry brown in hot fat. Cut in halves lengthwise and send to the table on a bed of parsley and garnish with bacon cooked in the manner given below: slice as thin as possible. Hold the bacon, rind down, and do not try to cut through it till you have the required number of slices, then shave it all at one time from the rind.
Separate the slices and lay on a fine wire broiler, put over a pan and place in a hot oven till the bacon is transparent.
Do not burn it.-Anne Warner.
A pre-canned-goods-era version of Scotch eggs that swaps the usual sausage coating for a ham paste bound with a bread panade. The technique is sound; only the shopping and a few numbers need translating.
- The eggsHolding eggs in water just below boiling for half an hour is a slow-cook method that keeps the yolk from turning grey and rubbery. Modern equivalent: 11 to 12 minutes at a bare simmer, then straight into ice water so the shells slip off cleanly.
- Deviled hamThis means the canned, spiced ham spread sold in small tins, not sliced ham with mustard on it. One cup is roughly 8 ounces, about two of the standard small tins; a food-processor paste of cooked ham with mustard and cayenne stands in well.
- The panadeCooking a third of a cup of crumbs into a third of a cup of milk gives a stiff paste, not a batter. It should hold together on a spoon before the ham and raw egg go in, or the coating will slide off the eggs in the fat.
- Coating and chillingDivide the paste into six before you start so each egg gets an even jacket. Twenty minutes in the refrigerator after crumbing firms everything up and is the single thing most likely to keep the coating intact.
- FryingThe recipe says only 'hot fat,' with no depth or temperature given; either shallow or deep fat will work, and around 350 to 365F is a safe working range. The eggs are already cooked and the raw egg in the binder needs only a few minutes, so fry to a deep brown, three to four minutes, and drain on paper.
- The bacon garnish'A hot oven' in period terms is somewhere in the 400 to 450F range. Modern bacon comes rindless and pre-sliced, so the trick of shaving slices from the rind in one pass is obsolete; lay thin slices on a rack over a sheet pan and take them out the moment they go translucent, well short of dark.
- YieldSix eggs cut lengthwise gives twelve halves, enough for six at lunch or supper. They are best warm rather than hot, and they hold better than most fried food.
Scotch eggs are traditionally credited to the London grocer Fortnum & Mason as a portable food for coach travellers, though the attribution is repeated far more often than it is documented; the name is sometimes traced instead to "scotching," an old term for mincing or chopping meat, though that derivation is equally unproven. What dates this particular version is the filling: deviled ham in tins was among the earlier widely marketed convenience foods in American kitchens, and turn-of-the-century cookbooks made frequent use of it as a shortcut to seasoned meat that needed no butcher. The recipe carries a contributor's signature, and the fussy instruction on shaving bacon from the rind is a reminder that bacon then often arrived as a slab and slicing it thin enough was the cook's problem, not the packer's.