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Cream of Scallop Soup
1 quart scallops 1 tablespoon chopped onion 4 cups milk 5 tablespoons butter 2 cloves 1/4 cup flour Bit of bay leaf Salt 1/4 teaspoon peppercorns Pepper Clean scallops, reserve one-half cup and finely chop remainder. Add these to milk, with seasonings and two tablespoons butter, and cook slowly twenty minutes. Strain and thicken with remaining butter and flour cooked together. Parboil reserved scallops, and add to soup. Serve with small biscuits or oysterettes.
A milk-based scallop bisque of the type common in American cookbooks around 1900, where the scallops are cooked into the milk for flavour, strained out, and a few reserved ones returned whole for texture.
- Do not let the milk boilScallops scorch milk quickly and the mixture will curdle or catch on the bottom. Hold it just below a simmer for the twenty minutes, ideally over a heat diffuser or in a double boiler.
- A quart of scallopsScallops were sold by volume by the fishmonger; a quart is roughly 2 lb of shucked meat. Bay scallops were the usual New England market scallop, but sea scallops chopped fine work the same way.
- The reserved half cup"Parboil" here means a brief dip in simmering water or the soup itself, one to two minutes at most. Scallops firm up almost instantly and turn rubbery with any real cooking.
- Roux and thickeningCook the remaining 3 tablespoons butter with the 1/4 cup flour for two or three minutes without colouring, then whisk in the hot strained milk gradually. Simmer a few minutes more to lose the raw flour taste.
- SeasoningsThe cloves, bay and peppercorns are meant to be strained out with the chopped scallops, so add them loose rather than tied in cloth. Salt and pepper are listed without quantity: season at the end, after straining.
- OysterettesThese were small soup crackers of the type still sold as oyster crackers. Any plain cracker serves.
- YieldThe four cups of milk, once strained and thickened, gives roughly four first-course servings, or six small cups. The recipe states no yield.
Cream soups built on milk thickened with a butter-and-flour roux were a staple of American cookery-school teaching in the decades around 1900, and this recipe follows that pattern: an aromatic infusion of milk, a strained base, a thickening, and a garnish of the principal ingredient held back so it is not overcooked. The same logic of using the bulk of the shellfish for flavour and reserving a portion for body appears in lobster and oyster bisques of the period. Scallops were then a relatively cheap Atlantic coast shellfish, dredged from New England beds, and in books of this kind they turn up chiefly in chowders, soups and fried preparations rather than as the seared centrepiece they have since become.