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Tomato Sauce (Remove the shells)
Remove the shells from the eggs and cover them thinly with the quenelle or sausage meat.
Then egg and crumb carefully and fry in hot fat.
Cut each egg carefully in half; arrange the cut side upwards on a dish, and serve tomato sauce round.
This is the second half of a Scotch egg recipe; the original page assumes you have already hard-boiled and cooled the eggs and made a farce. A few gaps are worth filling before you start.
- The missing first stepThe eggs must be hard-boiled and completely cold before coating — about 10 minutes at a bare simmer, then straight into cold water. Warm eggs sweat under the meat and the coating slides off in the fat.
- Quenelle meatA quenelle forcemeat in this period is raw meat or poultry pounded with panada and egg, then sieved — much finer and softer than sausage meat. Either works here, but the quenelle mixture needs a firm chill before you can wrap it around an egg.
- Wrap thinly and sealAim for 1/4 inch of meat, pressed on with damp hands and sealed with no seams. This is the hinge of the dish: any gap opens in the fat and the filling bursts out.
- Egg and crumbBeaten whole egg, then dry fine white crumbs. A second coat gives a sturdier crust; chill the coated eggs 20 minutes so the crumb sets.
- "Hot fat"The recipe gives no temperature. In practice a moderate deep-fat heat, roughly 340-350F, suits it: hotter than that browns the crumb before the raw forcemeat cooks through. Allow 8-10 minutes, and take the meat to 165F if you want certainty.
- CuttingDrain on paper and let the eggs rest a few minutes before halving, or the yolk smears. A thin, sharp blade wiped between cuts keeps the cut face clean, which is the whole point of serving them upwards.
- Sauce and yieldSauce -- Pour the tomato sauce around the dish rather than over, so the crumb stays crisp.
The odd title here is probably an artefact of the book's layout: the truncated heading suggests that these instructions are the tail of a Scotch egg recipe that has been separated from its own heading, with the recipe for the sauce perhaps running above. The origins of the Scotch egg are contested — Fortnum & Mason has long claimed them as a travellers' provision, though this is a company tradition rather than documented history — and by the time of the high-class cookery manuals they had been absorbed into the professional repertoire as a savoury, the small hot dish served after the sweet at a late-Victorian and Edwardian dinner. The use of quenelle forcemeat rather than plain sausage meat is the mark of that kitchen: the same pounded, sieved farce that filled a vol-au-vent or was poached into quenelles was pressed into service as a coating, and the tomato sauce poured around the base is a characteristic finish of the period, when a coloured sauce and a neat cut face did most of the work of presentation.