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Scotch Woodcock
For six people use five hard boiled eggs; one tablespoon of anchovy paste; a speck of cayenne; one-half teaspoon of salt; two tablespoons of butter; one of flour; one cup of milk and six small slices of bread. Chop the eggs quite fine.
A savoury of anchovy, egg and cream sauce on toast, given here in the sauce chapter because the sauce is the whole dish. The printed text breaks off after "Chop the eggs quite fine," so the assembly has to be inferred from standard practice of the period.
- What the method must have beenThe butter and flour make a roux, the cup of milk goes in to form a thin white sauce, and the chopped egg, anchovy paste, salt and cayenne are stirred through it. That mixture is spooned over six small slices of buttered toast. Some versions spread the anchovy paste directly on the toast and keep it out of the sauce; either reading works.
- The hinge: dissolve the anchovy paste off the heatThe hinge: add the anchovy paste off the heat -- it blends more smoothly into a hot sauce than a boiling one. Take the pan off the burner, whisk the paste in until smooth, then return it briefly to warm through.
- SaltHalf a teaspoon of salt plus a tablespoon of anchovy paste is a great deal of salt by current palates, more so if the butter is salted. Add the anchovy first, taste, then salt.
- Anchovy pasteStill sold in tubes, and the closest thing to the period product. Two or three oil-packed anchovy fillets mashed to a paste substitute cleanly; Worcestershire is not a substitute, being thinner and sweeter.
- Sauce consistencyOne tablespoon of flour to a cup of milk gives a thin white sauce, loose enough to soak into the toast rather than sit on it. If it thickens past pouring while you chop the eggs, loosen it with a splash more milk.
- ToastThe recipe says only "six small slices of bread"; small slices of a firm white loaf, toasted dry, will hold the sauce without collapsing. Toast it last and serve at once, as it softens quickly.
- Yield and place in the mealSix servings as written, but these are savoury-course portions of one small slice each. As a lunch or supper dish for four, count on two slices per person and increase the sauce by half.
Scotch woodcock contains no woodcock, and probably no Scot: it belongs to the family of jokey British "mock game" names, like Welsh rabbit, in which a cheap egg-and-toast savoury borrows the title of an expensive bird. It was a fixture of the English savoury course, the small salty dish served after the sweet and before the port, and it survived into the twentieth century largely in club and dining-room cooking. Its appearance in an American book under Sauces, rather than among the entrées, is at least suggestive of how the dish was understood: as a matter of technique, alongside the white sauces. The pairing of anchovy with hard-boiled egg was a period habit more broadly, turning up in anchovy toasts, egg sauces for fish and the anchovy butters that sat on Edwardian sideboards.