Way of Making
INGREDIENTS for dish for 3 persons.-3 eggs, 3 sardines, 3 slices of buttered toast, pint of milk, salt, cayenne.
AVERAGE COST, 9d.
Bone the sardines, pound them in a mortar with a seasoning of cayenne. Make 3 slices of toast, well butter them, spread them with the sardine paste and put them to keep hot while the sauce is being made.
Make this as in preceding recipe, using, however, the whole eggs and substituting milk for the cream. Pour the sauce over the sardine toast, and serve as quickly as possible.
TIME.-5 or 6 minutes to make the sauce.
SEASONABLE at any time.
Woodcock, Scotch. (Tappit Hen.) - INGREDIENTS for dish for 4 persons. lb. of some good toasting cheese, 4 eggs, 4 slices of bread, butter, seasoning of pepper and salt. AVERAGE COST, 18.
Toast the bread, cut off the crust, and butter well. Melt the cheese cut in very thin slices in a saucepan in which a piece of butter has been oiled, with a good seasoning of pepper and salt, and at the same time poach the eggs. Pour the cheese over the toast, and on each slice lay a poached egg. The excellence of this dish depends upon its being quickly prepared and sent to table very hot. The toast should not be allowed to get dry in the oven, but it must be kept hot while the other ingredients are being prepared.
TIME.-5 minutes to melt the cheese, or more if not a rich one.
SEASONABLE for a winter supper dish.
THE WOODCOCK. "Yet we must eat and drink, as you say."
CLOUGH.
YEAST-CAKE.
EAST-CAKE.
INGREDIENTS for 2 moderate - sized cakes. lb. of flour, lb. of butter, pint of milk, 1 tablespoonful of good yeast, 3 eggs, lb. of currants, 1/2 lb. of white moist sugar, 2 oz. of candied-peel. AVERAGE COST, 1s. 9d.
Put the milk and butter into a saucepan, and shake it round over a fire until the butter is melted, but do not allow the milk to get very hot. Put the flour into a basin, stir to it the milk and butter, the yeast and, eggs, which should be well beaten, and form the whole into a smooth dough. Let it stand in a warm place, covered with a cloth, to rise, and, when ufficiently risen, add the currants, sugar and candied-peel cut into thin slices. When all the ingredients are thoroughly mixed, line 2 moderate-sized cake-tins with buttered paper, which should be about six inches higher than the tin; pour in the mixture, let it stand to rise again for another 1/2 hour, and then bake the cakes in a brisk oven for about 1 hour. If the tops of them become too brown, cover them with paper until they are done through. A few drops of YEAST-DUMPLINGS. essence of lemon, or a little grated nutmeg may be added when the flavour is liked.
TIME. From 1 to 1½ hour.
SEASONABLE at any time.
Yeast-Cake. (From Bakers' Dough.) INGREDIENTS for 2-quartern cakes.1 quartern of bakers' dough, 1 lb. of sultanas, 1/4 lb. of sugar (more if the cake is liked very sweet), lb. of butter or dripping, a flavouring of spice. AVERAGE COST, 2s. Have the other ingredients ready before the dough arrives; well work them in, then put the cake into well-buttered tins or tins lined with buttered paper, and bake the cakes in a quick oven from 1 to 10 hour.
Cakes made in this way, though plain, are nice for children, and may be baked in small tins as buns.
TIME.-1 to 1 hour to bake the cake.
SEASONABLE at any time.
Four separate entries share this page: a mock "woodcock" of sardine paste under an egg sauce, the better-known Scotch Woodcock with melted cheese and a poached egg, and two yeast-raised fruit cakes. All are quick, and all depend on being served or baked hot.
- Missing fractionsSeveral quantities on this page have lost their fractions in printing, and appear simply as "lb. of flour" or "pint of milk". For the first yeast-cake, a workable reading is 1 lb flour, 4 oz butter, 1/2 pint milk, 6 oz currants and 4 oz sugar, but the original figures cannot be recovered with certainty from the text as given.
- The egg sauceThe sauce for the first dish is a stirred custard: whole eggs beaten with milk, seasoned, and thickened over gentle heat. It must not reach a simmer or it will scramble. Take it off the heat while it still coats the spoon loosely and pour it at once.
- "Good toasting cheese"A firm Cheddar, Cheshire or Lancashire. Melt it in thin slices over low heat in the pan of oiled butter the recipe calls for; high heat makes it seize into rubber and weep fat.
- Oven heatA "brisk" or "quick" oven is generally reckoned at somewhere around 400-425F (200-220C), though the book gives no temperatures. A yeast-raised fruit cake of this size is better started hot for about 15 minutes and finished at around 350F (180C). The recipe itself directs only that the tops be covered with paper if they become too brown; it gives no reason for the six-inch paper collar.
- A quartern of doughA quartern is usually reckoned at about 3½ to 4 lb, so the second cake is built on roughly that weight of plain bread dough. Work the fat, sugar, fruit and spice in while the dough is still slack, and expect the enrichment to slow the rise.
- Baking timeThe stated "1 to 10 hour" for the dough cake is a printing error. Two cakes of that size need about an hour to an hour and a quarter; as buns, 20 to 25 minutes.
- Sardine pasteDrain the sardines well, mash rather than pound if you prefer, and taste before adding salt; the recipe seasons the paste with cayenne alone.
- ServingBoth savouries scale directly, one egg and one slice of toast per person. Warm the plates. Cheese or custard poured onto a cold plate sets before it reaches the table.
Scotch Woodcock contains no woodcock, and that is the joke: like Welsh rabbit and Scotch woodcock's cousin the mock turtle, the name promises game and delivers a supper of eggs, toast and something savoury and salty. It belongs to the Victorian and Edwardian savoury course, the small hot dish served after the sweet at dinner and before the dessert of fruit and nuts, and it survived long after that course vanished as club and college food. The usual version pairs anchovy or sardine paste with a soft egg custard, which is what the first entry here describes; the cheese-and-poached-egg version, labelled "Tappit Hen" ", to to a rabbit. The yeast-cakes on the same page speak of a different economy altogether: a household that either had a bread sponge going anyway, or could send out for a quartern of the baker's dough and turn it into a plain fruit cake for the children without heating its own bread oven.