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Scotch Woodcock
4 "hard-boiled" eggs 3 tablespoons butter 1½ tablespoons flour 1 cup milk ¼ teaspoon salt Few grains cayenne Anchovy sauce Make a thin white sauce of butter, flour, milk, and seasonings; add eggs finely chopped, and season with anchovy sauce. Serve same as Welsh Rarebit I.
Shredded Ham with Currant Jelly Sauce 1/2 tablespoon butter 1/3 cup currant jelly Few grains cayenne 1/4 cup Sherry wine 1 cup cold cooked ham, cut in small strips Put butter and currant jelly into the chafing-dish. As soon as melted, add cayenne, wine, and ham; simmer five minutes.
A chafing-dish savoury: anchovy-spiked cream sauce bound with chopped egg, spooned over toast. It comes together in under ten minutes and depends entirely on how gently the sauce is handled.
- The hingeKeep the sauce below a simmer once the eggs go in. Hard-boiled yolk in a hot white sauce will turn grainy and the whites will squeak if the pan is pushed too far.
- Salt quantityThe salt reads as a garbled fraction; a quarter teaspoon suits a cup of milk here. Salt lightly at the start, since the anchovy sauce carries a good deal of its own.
- Anchovy sauceThe book means a bottled anchovy essence or sauce, a standard storecupboard item of the period. Two to three teaspoons of anchovy paste thinned with a little of the hot sauce, or a dash of Worcestershire plus mashed anchovy fillet, gives a similar effect.
- Thin white sauceThree tablespoons butter to one and a half of flour is a loose ratio by modern habit, and more butter than a thin white sauce usually carries. Cook the roux a minute before the milk goes in so it does not taste of raw flour.
- Chafing-dishA double-boiler insert or a heavy saucepan over low heat does the same job. The chafing-dish keeps the sauce warm at table without scorching.
- "Serve same as Welsh Rarebit I"That means served over toast, following whatever form the rarebit recipe specifies.
- YieldEnough for four small savoury portions on toast, or two as a light supper.
Scotch Woodcock belongs to the English savoury course, the small hot dish served after the sweet at a Victorian or Edwardian dinner, and like Welsh Rabbit and Bombay Duck its name is often said to be a joke: there is no woodcock in it, only egg and anchovy on toast, the sort of thing a household could produce at speed from the storecupboard. The connection to Scotland is unexplained and probably no more than the same habit of pinning a modest dish on a neighbouring nation. Its inclusion among the chafing-dish recipes reflects the American fashion, strong around 1900, for the chafing-dish as equipment for late suppers, club rooms and college lodgings, where cooking was done at the table in front of guests and anything requiring an oven was out of the question.