Scotch Eggs

I clicked on one of those random hit-bait “Suggested Post” articles on Facebook that takes you to a website full of unnecessarily-click-inflated slide shows and questionable facts. This one happened to be a list of “disgusting foods your grandparents ate”. Most of the entries were strange combinations of sea food, pimento and lime gelatin (Jello molds were apparently a huge thing…) with a few outliers that are ‘acceptable’ foods today, just with unflattering-looking sauces. One thing was wholly inaccurately described as “basically an egg wrapped in mystery meat with some Scotch thrown in for some reason”. Someone was running out of ideas and had stopped bothering to Google their subject matter…

Anyway, Scotch eggs sound like they could be awesome. It’s a hard-boiled egg wrapped with sausage meat, breaded, and deep-fried. It’s Scotch because it’s a Scottish thing, and has nothing whatsoever to do with the alcoholic beverage. (I figured maybe there was a bit in the recipe to add flavor, but it’s not involved at all. On the side is up to you, I suppose.)

This is very much in the spirit of the Minnesota State Fair, where the question is always, “Will it Fry?” You can find anything deep-fried and served on a stick. The Iowa State Fair is much the same, and the county fairs tend to be similar, although perhaps smaller in scope. So, I guess I wasn’t disgusted so much as intrigued by the idea.

This guy suggests buying some sausages and slitting them open to get good sausage meat, but our local Fareway sells pretty good sausage out of the meat counter, and there are several different ‘types’. I am not sure how the nutmeg or English mustard would jive with breakfast sausage, but I think I’d use “American” mustard and omit the nutmeg anyway. This sounds like it would work just as well with Italian-style spicing, which is what we usually do.

Deep-frying anything costs approximately one million dollars in cooking oil and Scotch eggs appear to be somewhat prep-intensive, so I’m not going to jump up and try this right now. When I do, though, I will definitely be writing another 400 words about that.