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Egg and Bread-crumbs (Boil six eggs quite hard take)
Six Eggs (Plovers' are the best). Half a pound of Sausages, or Quenelle Meat. Boil six eggs quite hard, take them out of the shell carefully, and when quite cold mask them all over with quenelle or sausage meat, egg and breadcrumb them and fry them a nice brown. Take them out of the fat, cut them in half with a sharp knife, stand them up on the narrow end, dish them up with tomato sauce round. If plovers' eggs are used they should be boiled twenty minutes.
This is a Scotch egg dressed for the savoury course, and the whole thing turns on getting a dry, cold egg and a thin, even coat of meat that will not split in the fat.
- The hinge: dry the eggsHard-boiled eggs shelled and cooled must be patted completely dry, and lightly floured, before the forcemeat goes on. Any surface moisture and the coating slides off in the fryer, taking the crumbs with it.
- "Quite hard"Ten minutes at a bare simmer for large hen eggs, then straight into cold water so the shells come away cleanly. The yolk needs to be fully set or the halves will not stand up on the plate.
- Quenelle meatIn this period quenelle meat means a fine forcemeat of raw veal, chicken or game pounded with a panada and egg. Good sausagemeat, the alternative given, is the practical choice; a coarse, very fatty sausage will shrink and crack, so use a firm fine-cut one.
- Egg and breadcrumbFlour, then beaten egg, then dry fine white crumbs. Press the crumbs on firmly and chill the coated eggs for twenty minutes before frying to set the meat.
- Frying temperatureDeep fat at 340-350F, five to six minutes. Hotter than that and the crumbs colour before the raw forcemeat is cooked through; the meat layer should reach 165F.
- Cutting and standingLet them rest two or three minutes, then cut with a thin sharp knife in one stroke, wiping the blade between eggs. Stood on the cut narrow end they show the yolk; a spoonful of tomato sauce poured round the base, not over them, keeps the crumb crisp.
- Plovers' eggsTwenty minutes was standard advice for a small wild egg with a tough shell, but it is now moot: lapwing and other plovers' eggs cannot legally be taken or sold in Britain, and the birds are protected. Quail eggs are the modern stand-in, and they need about four minutes.
- YieldSix eggs give twelve halves, enough for six as a savoury or a first course. As a main dish with salad, allow one whole egg each, so six servings.
Coating a boiled egg in forcemeat and frying it is an English idea recorded from the early nineteenth century — the earliest known printed version appears in Maria Rundell's A New System of Domestic Cookery (1809) — and it is often said to have been sold by Fortnum & Mason as a portable food for travellers, though that claim is traditional rather than documented. What marks this version as late-Victorian high-class cookery is the placing and the presentation: it sits in the savoury section, the small hot course served after the sweet at a formal dinner, and it is cut, stood upright and ringed with tomato sauce rather than eaten cold in the hand. The alternative of plovers' eggs is a period luxury signal — wild eggs, gathered in spring and sold expensively in London markets, were a fashionable delicacy in the decades before bird protection law caught up with the trade.