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Imperial Scallop
One cup of chopped ham, one and one-half cups of cream sauce, three hardboiled eggs, one-half cup of fresh bread crumbs, with a large teaspoon of melted butter. Stir the chopped ham in cream sauce, put one-half in a baking dish, add the chopped eggs, then the rest of ham, cover with bread crumbs, and bake until it is a very light brown.-Miss A.
Waring.
A signed contributor's recipe of the kind that fills late nineteenth-century community cookbooks: a scalloped dish built from leftover boiled ham and a jug of white sauce. The whole thing rests on the sauce, which the original assumes you can make without being told.
- "Scallop" means the method, not the shellfishAn imperial scallop is layered chopped food bound with sauce and topped with crumbs, baked until browned. No scallops are involved, and no scallop shells are needed either — a shallow dish of about one quart is right.
- Cream sauceA medium white sauce suits: about 3 tablespoons butter, 3 tablespoons flour, and 1 1/2 cups milk or light cream, cooked until it coats a spoon. Cook the flour in the butter a minute or two before adding liquid or the finished dish tastes pasty.
- Season the sauce, not the hamNo salt or pepper is listed; cured ham of the period was often salty enough to carry the dish on its own. Taste before adding salt; a grating of nutmeg, a little dry mustard, or a spoonful of sherry would not be out of place in this sauce.
- Oven temperatureThe original gives none. Bake at 375F for 20 to 25 minutes — everything in the dish is already cooked, so you are only heating it through and colouring the top.
- Butter the crumbsThe recipe lists melted butter without saying where it goes; it is most likely intended to be tossed with the bread crumbs rather than drizzled over afterwards. Dry crumbs scorch in patches; buttered crumbs brown evenly, which suits 'a very light brown.'
- Fresh crumbsFresh bread crumbs means soft crumbs torn or grated from a day-old loaf, not the dry sandy crumbs sold in canisters. They absorb less sauce and give a lighter crust.
- Chop, do not minceHam and eggs both want a coarse dice, about 1/4 inch. Ground ham turns the layers into a single paste and the eggs disappear entirely.
- YieldAbout three to four servings as a luncheon or supper dish. It reheats poorly once the crumbs soften, so bake it in the dish it goes to the table in.
Scalloped dishes were the standard American answer to cooked meat left over from a joint: chop it, bind it in white sauce, crumb it, and put it back in the oven so it arrives at the table looking like a dish rather than a remainder. The spelling wandered between "scallop," "escallop" and "scollop," all generally traced to the same root as the shell, since such mixtures were once baked and served in shells. "Imperial" here is decoration rather than description — grand-sounding titles were freely attached to modest chafing-dish and supper recipes in this period. The attribution to Miss A. Waring is characteristic of such collections: readers sent in their household standbys, and the recipes were printed terse and signed, on the assumption that any woman running a kitchen already knew how to make a cream sauce and how hot her own oven ran.