The Oxford Companion to Food gives the first instance of the name as of 1809, in an edition of Maria Rundell's A New System of Domestic Cookery.

[1] According to the Oxford Companion to Food, food historian Annette Hope speculated in 1987 that the inspiration may have been Indian koftas[1] such as the Mughlai dish called nargisi kofta ("Narcissus meatballs"), in which a boiled egg is encased in a seasoned ground-meat mixture and then fried.

[4] It has also been suggested that they were originally called "scorch" eggs, as they were cooked over an open flame, though according to surviving recipes they were deep-fried in lard.

'Scotching' as a culinary process is also sometimes cited as the origin, though what "scotching" was is open to interpretation, from the inclusion of anchovies to simply mincing meat.

[12] A fatty food,[13] a typical sausage-coated Scotch egg has about 200 mg dietary cholesterol per 100 grams.