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Scotch Woodcock
Beat thoroughly three eggs with a little anchovy paste; pour them into a saucepan with three-quarters of a breakfast cupful of milk, and stir them over the fire until thick, but without boiling. Cut four slices of bread, remove the crusts, and toast them to a light brown. Butter the toast, spread also some anchovy paste over, and arrange them on a hot dish. Pour the custard over, and serve very hot.
Scrambled Eggs with Cream and Mushrooms Beat together four eggs and season with salt and pepper; put a quarter of a gill of cream and a small piece of butter in a fryingpan, melt the butter, pour in the beaten eggs, and stir quickly over the fire for three or four minutes. Before cooking the eggs, chop up some mushrooms, and fry them lightly in butter. Dish when the eggs are done after mixing the mushrooms with them.
Two related egg dishes, both worked over direct heat with nothing to hide behind. The whole of Scotch woodcock rests on keeping the egg mixture below a simmer.
- Never let it boilThree eggs to roughly six or seven ounces of milk is a thin stirred custard, and it will curdle the moment it approaches a simmer. Stir constantly over low heat until it coats the spoon and reads about 170-180F, then pull it off the heat; a heatproof bowl over barely simmering water gives more control than a saucepan on the burner.
- Breakfast cupfulA breakfast cup is usually reckoned at 8 to 10 fluid ounces, so three-quarters of one is somewhere between 6 and 7 1/2 fl oz. Err on the low side if you want the custard to nap the toast rather than run off it.
- A gillA gill is a quarter-pint, half a US cup, so the quarter gill of cream in the scrambled eggs is about 2 tablespoons. That is what keeps them soft.
- Anchovy pasteModern tubed anchovy paste is very salty and concentrated. Start with a scant teaspoon in the eggs and a thin scrape on the toast, and hold back on salt entirely until you have tasted.
- Toast the bread lateThe toast should go under the custard while still hot and crisp. Cut it, crust it and butter it while the eggs are warming, not before, or it will soften and go leathery on the plate.
- Three or four minutes is longFor the scrambled eggs, work on low heat over a modern burner and pull the pan while the curds still look slightly underdone; they carry on setting off the heat.
- Drain the mushroomsMushrooms release a good deal of liquid. Fry them until that liquid has cooked away and they have begun to color, or they will thin the eggs and leave a gray pool on the dish.
- YieldThe woodcock makes four slices, which is two light servings or a single savoury course for four. The scrambled eggs serve two.
Scotch woodcock contains no woodcock, in the same spirit as Welsh rabbit contains no rabbit: the name is often said to be one of those British kitchen jokes in which a cheap dish borrows the title of a costly one. It belongs to the savoury, the small hot salty course served in Victorian and Edwardian England after the sweet and before the port, and anchovy on toast under soft egg is close to the standard form of it. Its appearance in Oscar Tschirky's 1896 collection shows how thoroughly the Waldorf's kitchen drew on English club and country-house cooking for its lighter courses. The pairing here with scrambled eggs and cream is typical of the book's layout, which groups egg cookery together with little regard for whether a dish is breakfast or the end of dinner.