Victory Scotch Eggs – Cooking Through the Decades

Years go in a fit of optimism I thought I might occasionally post recipes on here.

In actual fact I think I managed to share one, for Cranberry and Mulled Wine Stew. I do very occasionally post recipes on Lipstick, Lettuce & Lycra, but to be honest I’m really not organised enough to post recipes often that aren’t for cocktails. I mostly eat pasta, or potatoes with some kind of meat, and indulging them with the name “recipe” would be a little grand.

Recently Rennie, yes, they of the Heartburn remedies, got in touch with me as they have launched a “Cooking Through the Decades” campaign. They wanted me to make, and post, a 1940s recipe. I accepted, because I thought it would be fun, and because Mr Chick and I once tried to live off rations for a week.

At the time we thought it would be an interesting experiment, and potentially an interesting blog post. I started well, with an only slightly watery leek and potato soup. I used a cook book called Feeding the Nation to hunt out recipes, and all was going swimmingly. I made a fish pie, that took about 12 years to cook while I mashed potatoes and made white sauce from scratch, and I made a stew, which was ok.

Then on Wednesday we caved and ordered a takeaway as neither of us could face making fish cakes, or eating any more potatoes.

Anyway, the moral of this story is that I remembered that while it WAS possible to cook 1940s style, it was a bit of a faff, but I also thought that maybe this would be a fun thing to revisit, in a smaller way.

So I went back through my cookbook attempting to find a 1940s recipe that looked both tasty, fun and within my limited home making skills. Finally I settled on:

Victory Scotch Eggs

I’m not going to pretend that my “doing actual cooking” experiment went entirely according to plan. The supermarket we went to didn’t have plain sausage meat, so, although it wasn’t in the original 1940s recipe, I thought it would be exciting and tasty to use apricot and almond stuffing to wrap the eggs. Except apparently sausage meat with bits in it falls apart when baked as the apricot and almond bits created fault lines in my carefully wrapped eggs.

The whole thing tasted blooming delicious though, so I’m going to give them a go again with the proper sausage meat. These eggs would have been a treat in the 1940s, as the “Victory” part suggests they might have been served as food at a party to celebrate VE day, and with their creamy, cheesy yolks they were slightly more luxurious than a regular scotch egg!

If you fancy giving Victory Scotch Eggs a go yourself, then here’s the recipe!

Makes 4

Ingredients:
4 Eggs
50g Cheddar Cheese
Tbsp Mayonnaise
450g Sausage meat
Milk
Breadcrumbs

Hard boil the eggs for 10 minutes and then leave to cool.

Preheat the oven to 200 degrees and grease a baking tray.

Once cool slice the eggs in half and remove the yolks.

Mash the egg yolks in a bowl with the cheese and mayonnaise before carefully refilling the egg whites and fitting the halves back together.

Divide the sausage meat into 4 and wrap each of the eggs carefully, making sure they are all covered.

brush the sausage meat with milk, roll the eggs in breadcrumbs until fully covered and then place on the greased baking tray.

Bake at 200ºc for 30 minutes.

Slice the eggs in half to serve.

This post was produced in collaboration with Rennie who provided supermarket vouchers to cover the ingredients and compensate me for my time. All poor cooking efforts are my own.