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Woodcock Toast
Pound to a paste the freshly boiled livers of two fowls (ducks preferred), one teaspoonful of anchovy paste (or one anchovy may be pounded with the livers), half a teaspoonful of sugar, one tablespoonful of butter, one-fourth a teaspoonful of spiced pepper and the yolks of two raw eggs.
Pass through a sieve, dilute with a little hot cream from a cup of cream heated over hot water, stir, and return to the rest of the cream. Stir until thickened, then pour over sippets or rounds of toast sautéd a golden brown in a little butter.
A chafing-dish savoury built on a liver forcemeat loosened into hot cream — essentially a warm liver custard poured over fried toast. Everything depends on keeping the cream below a simmer.
- The hinge: never let it boilTwo raw yolks go into hot cream, so this is a custard. Hold it over hot (not boiling) water and stir until it coats the spoon, around 175-180F; a true simmer will scramble the yolks and the sauce will break into grains.
- Temper, don't dumpThe instruction to dilute the liver paste with a little hot cream first and then return it to the rest is the whole technique. Reversed, the yolks meet the full heat of the cream at once and curdle.
- Quantity of liversTwo duck livers is roughly 3 oz; two chicken livers nearer 2 oz. Weigh rather than count, since modern poultry livers vary. "Freshly boiled" means poached through, about 8-10 minutes, then cooled enough to pound without cooking the yolks on contact.
- Spiced pepperA period house blend of pepper with warm spices; the proportions and the exact spices varied from kitchen to kitchen, with clove, mace and nutmeg common. Substitute a pinch of white pepper with a scrape of nutmeg and mace.
- SippetsSmall triangles or fingers of toast, here fried in butter rather than dry-toasted. Cut them from firm white bread and fry just before serving; they soften quickly under the sauce.
- Anchovy pasteAnchovy paste is very salty, and modern tubed pastes may well be saltier than the bottled sort the book assumed. Start with half the teaspoonful, and salt the finished sauce only after tasting.
- Cream"A cup of cream" is best taken here as heavy or whipping cream. Half-and-half or milk will thicken more slowly and curdle more readily.
- YieldNo yield is given; the quantities suggest about four small savoury portions, or two as a light supper dish. It does not reheat well — the custard tightens and weeps.
The name is borrowed, not literal: there is no woodcock in it. The best-known dish of the type is Scotch woodcock, anchovy paste spread on toast under soft creamy eggs. The name is traditionally explained as the salty, faintly gamey mixture standing in for the flavour of the bird, which was roasted undrawn and eaten with its trail spread on toast — but that explanation is folk tradition rather than documented, and 'woodcock' savouries beyond the Scotch version are not well attested. This version pushes the imitation further by pounding poultry liver into the mixture, duck for preference, to get closer to that offal richness. Savouries of this kind belonged to the end of dinner or to late suppers, and the chafing dish — a fashionable American amusement around 1900, when Janet McKenzie Hill was compiling this book — suited any dish needing gentle heat and constant stirring.