Why my mum’s scotch eggs are my Twixmas essential

The culinary essence of the festive season is a kind of sanctioned chaos. Never mind that, from one angle, Christmas is mostly just rigidly observed collective food traditions and grown adults dying on the hill of whether yorkshire puddings should be served with turkey.

I don’t think I ever really feel that warming yuletide rush until I have turned a disparate assemblage of leftovers into what, to the casual observer, looks distinctly like a completely unhinged plate of food. I think most of us will know the sort of thing: there will be ragged hunks of surplus cheese, brine-slicked olives, stray bits of fruit and thick slices of the last of the cola-glazed ham; there will be a splat of cranberry sauce, a wodge of stewed red cabbage, and a dense, sticky slice of breathalyser-troubling Christmas cake. It is, I suppose, what most people think of as a Twixmas picky tea. Or maybe even a TikTok “girl dinner”, where the specific “girl” being channeled is an exhausted Mrs Claus pouring herself a massive Baileys on Boxing Day.

However, in our household, these fridge-forages tend to feature one constant: a hulking, golden-yolked half of one of the peppery homemade scotch eggs that have become my mum’s most beloved signature and our family’s most sanctified, non-negotiable Christmas food tradition.

Christmases vary with changing life circumstances. The past 25 years or so of festive celebrations have featured inconveniently timed hospital stays, Covid-induced separation, a mass decamping to Florida, and those adolescent, semi-fallow years where my brothers and I would generally slump beside a scantly decorated tree, silently contending with our Yates’s Wine Lodge hangovers. Despite all this, and whether they arrive in steamed-up Tupperware or hot and burnished direct from the stove, there is no Christmas without those boulderous, deep-fried orbs.

One Christmas Day, in our indolent, child-free years, my wife and I had both nodded off on the old corner sofa, stuffed and content, only to wake at 1am to the sound of commotion and the drifting scent of sizzling pork. “Good news,” chirped mum, bustling in with a manic gleam. “The scotch eggs are ready.”

What began one year as a use for an accidental surfeit of stuffing-bound sausage meat has become one of winter’s most potent and long-lasting pleasures. And its popularity in West Africa in particular is longer established than I realised: once eggs were introduced to the culinary vernacular by colonial missionaries in the 1920s and 1930s, scotch eggs emerged as a favoured menu item at Nigerian fast-food chain Mr Bigg’s, and are especially beloved in Cameroon, where spiced mackerel is often substituted for pork. My adaptation of Mum’s recipe doesn’t feature anything quite so experimental as that, though I do “double scotch” them, as she does, with the enlivening addition of some scotch bonnet pepper and all-purpose seasoning. While I always thought their Christmassiness was an incidental quirk specific to my family, so many things about them – their laborious sense of festivity, the core ingredients required, their utility as part of the omnivorous household’s post-Boxing Day cavalcade of scavenged grazing plates – make them perfect for this time of year.

Start by gently placing four medium eggs in a bubbling pan of well-salted water and boiling for seven minutes exactly (this will get you fudgy, just-set yolks for eggs kept in the fridge; cook longer for a harder boil). Plunge them into a bowl of cold water to rest, cracking lightly at their bases to make peeling easier. Now, add a teaspoon each of black peppercorns, fennel seeds, all-purpose seasoning, chopped fresh sage and a finely chopped quarter of scotch bonnet to a mortar before grinding into a dryish rub and setting aside.

Split eight good-quality pork sausages (around 450g), discard the skins, and add your seasoning paste to the sausage meat. Mix well, before forming into four balls. Squash these between two pieces of clingfilm to about coaster-thickness, peel the eggs, lightly dust them in plain flour and then form each meat patty around each egg, patting together to form an even, tightly sealed oval.

Now make a pane line: three dinner plates, one filled with 120g plain flour, another with one beaten egg, and a final one with 120g panko breadcrumbs. Roll each sausage ball along the line, dunking in the flour and egg wash, before thoroughly coating in breadcrumbs. Warm about two and a half inches of vegetable oil in a saucepan to a medium, rippling heat(about 150C on a cooking thermometer, or at the point that a few breadcrumbs sizzle and take on colour after a few seconds), and fry the breaded scotch eggs in batches for six to eight minutes, keeping an eye on the crumb to make sure it doesn’t darken too quickly. Drain and leave to cool on kitchen paper. Serve with piccalilli or brown sauce, a chaotic plate of leftovers and, if you like, a fistful of mid-tier Celebrations in lieu of petits fours.