Woodcock, Scotch
INGREDIENTS. A few slices of hot buttered toast; allow 1 anchovy to each slice. For the sauce- pint of cream, the yolks of 3 eggs.
AVERAGE COST, 1s. 2d.
Separate the yolks from the whites of the eggs; beat the former, stir to them the cream, and bring the sauce to the boilingpoint, but do not allow it to boil, or it will curdle. Have ready some hot buttered toast, spread with anchovies pounded to a WOODCOCK, SCOTCH. paste; pour a little of the hot sauce on the top, and serve very hot and very quickly.
TIME.-5 minutes to make the sauce hot.
SEASONABLE at any time.
Woodcock, Scotch. (Another
A savoury of the old English dinner order: anchovy toast under a loose egg-and-cream custard. It takes minutes and depends entirely on heat control.
- The hingeThe sauce must never boil. Yolks slackened with cream set into scrambled curds well below boiling, so hold it over low heat or a bowl of barely simmering water and stir constantly until it coats the spoon.
- The cream quantityThe amount of cream has dropped out of the text and only "pint" survives; the missing figure was almost certainly a fraction. Three yolks would thicken something in the region of a quarter to half a pint (roughly 150-285 ml) into a pouring custard; a full pint would stay thin.
- AnchoviesAnchovy fillets in oil, mashed to a paste, can stand in for the salted whole fish the original probably assumes. Roughly a teaspoon of good anchovy paste per round of toast is about the equivalent of the single anchovy the recipe allows, and the dish is unlikely to need extra salt.
- Cost note"Average cost, 1s. 2d." is the Victorian household price for the whole dish, not a modern figure of any kind.
- ToastCut thick, butter while hot, and spread the anchovy right to the edges. Thin toast collapses under the sauce before it reaches the table.
- ServingThe instruction to serve very hot and very quickly is the whole point: the custard stiffens and the toast softens within a minute or two. Warm the plates.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield, but three yolks and the cream would probably dress four to six small rounds of toast.
Scotch woodcock contains no woodcock, and by most accounts never did: the name belongs to the family of joke dishes, like Welsh rabbit, in which a cheap larder ingredient stands in for expensive game. It belongs to the savoury course, a distinctly British institution that came after the sweet at Victorian and Edwardian dinners, when a small hot, salty mouthful was thought to settle the palate before the port. Anchovy was the workhorse of that course, appearing pounded on toast, in butters and in bottled essences, because it delivered depth without cost.