Eggs, Scotch
INGREDIENTS for dish for 4 persons.-6 eggs, 6 tablespoonfuls of forcemeat, made with anchovies or ham for flavouring, hot lard, pint of good brown gravy. AVERAGE COST, Is. 2d.
Boil the eggs for 10 minutes, strip them from the shells, and cover them with forcemeat. Fry a nice brown in boiling lard, drain them before the fire from their greasy moisture, dish them, and pour round from 1/4 to 1/22 a pint of good brown gravy. To enhance the appearance of the eggs, they may be rolled in beaten egg and sprinkled with bread-crumbs: but this is scarcely necessary if they are carefully fried. The flavour of the ham or the anchovy in the forcemeat must preponderate, as it should be very relishing.
TIME.-10 minutes to boil the eggs, 5 to 7 minutes to fry them.
SEASONABLE at any time.
A Victorian Scotch egg, coated not in sausage meat but in a seasoned forcemeat sharpened with ham or anchovy. The proportions are lean by modern habit, and the boiling time gives a fully set yolk.
- Forcemeat, not sausageVictorian forcemeat is a bound paste of fine breadcrumbs, chopped suet or butter, herbs and beaten egg, with minced ham or pounded anchovy for savour — closer to a stuffing than to a sausage. Modern Scotch eggs use seasoned pork sausage meat, which can be used instead if you prefer.
- Six tablespoonfuls is thinThat works out to a tablespoon per egg, which gives a coating of a few millimetres. Allow at least double if you want a jacket that holds together in the fat; the forcemeat must be pressed firmly with wet hands so it seals with no cracks.
- The hinge: seal and chillAny gap in the coating lets fat in and the forcemeat off. Chill the coated eggs for 20-30 minutes before frying so the fat in the mixture firms and the shell stays put.
- Boiling timeTen minutes gives a chalky, fully hard yolk, which is what the original intends since the eggs are fried afterwards. Eight minutes, then straight into iced water, gives a firmer white and a yolk still just golden at the centre and shells more cleanly.
- Hot lard"Boiling lard" means deep fat at roughly 350-375F. Lower and the coating absorbs grease; much higher and the outside colours before the forcemeat is cooked through. Five to seven minutes at that temperature is right for the forcemeat, which contains raw egg and raw ham or pork.
- Units and the garbled measureA pint here is the imperial 20 fl oz, so a pint of gravy is about 2 1/2 cups. The "1/4 to 1/22 a pint" in the method is still garbled; read it as 1/4 to 1/2 a pint, or 5 to 10 fl oz poured round the dish. The average cost in shillings and pence is a price of the period, not a measurement.
- Draining"Before the fire" means somewhere warm and airy. A rack in a 250F oven for a few minutes does the same job better than paper, which steams the crust soft.
- ServingFour persons from six eggs suggests these were a hot supper or entrée dish, sauced and eaten with a knife and fork, not the cold picnic food they became. Serve whole or halved, with the gravy poured round rather than over so the crust stays crisp.
Scotch eggs are traditionally traced to the London grocer Fortnum & Mason in the eighteenth century, though the attribution rests on company lore rather than a document, and similar egg-in-forcemeat dishes appear in Mughal and Middle Eastern cooking. The name is often said to come not from Scotland at all but from "scotching", which fits Mrs Beeton's insistence that the anchovy or ham flavour "must preponderate". What is clear from this version is that the dish belonged to the hot table: served in a dish with brown gravy poured round, it sits among the entrées of the Victorian repertoire, and the cold thing bought at a railway counter, with sausage meat replacing forcemeat, seems to be a later development.