[West Ender]

Now pay attention, I shall be asking questions later.

When you make a scotch egg you cover the egg with a coating of sausage meat and breadcrumbs. If it's going to work at all the sausage meat must stick to the outside of the egg, right? If it doesn't - it will just fall off into a sad little heap and you're just left with, er, an egg, right?

Now we get to the tricky bit. Mancie bit into a scotch egg that had a loose egg inside, an egg with a space round it, an egg that didn't fit. We've already proved that the egg must have fit inside before the thing was cooked, haven't we? So what happened?

The answer is obvious. This egg was laid by a Shrinking Leghorn hen. This breed comes out of the supermarket freezer weighing 6 lbs. Once home in your kitchen it is left to thaw and within a few hours you have rather a large pool of water and a chicken that weighs 4lbs. 8oz. Once it has been roasted, the chicken you thought was big enough to feed a family of 6 is just big enough to feed 3 of you, as long as you're not very hungry. The egg was patently the offspring of one of these and, true to the breed, it shrank to half size in the oven.

Q.E.D.