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Scalloped Scallops
Fry a light brown in butter, shaking often to prevent burning; if you have the shells, wash thoroughly and butter; otherwise use a baking dish well buttered; put in a layer of bread crumbs, well buttered, then one of scallops, and so on until the dish is full, having the crumbs at the top; cover with a white sauce made of two tablespoons of butter and two tablespoons of flour cooked together and then stirred smooth in a pint of milk, and bake twenty minutes, or until nicely browned.
A late-Victorian scallop gratin written in the shorthand of a cook who already knew the dish. The gaps worth filling are the quantities, the oven temperature, and the fact that the scallops get cooked twice.
- The hinge: don't cook them twiceBrowning the scallops in butter and then baking them twenty minutes will give you rubber. Sear them 30-45 seconds a side purely for color, or skip the frying entirely and layer them raw, in which case 15-18 minutes in the dish is plenty.
- Quantities the original omitsThe sauce as given (2 tbsp butter, 2 tbsp flour, 1 pint milk) suits about 1 1/2 lb of shucked scallops and 2 cups of fresh crumbs, filling a 1 1/2-quart dish or six large shells. That serves four as a main course.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. Set it to 400F: hot enough to brown the top in the stated twenty minutes without stewing the scallops beneath.
- The sauce is deliberately thinThe sauce is thin -- Two tablespoons of flour to a pint of milk is a thin white sauce by modern standards, closer to a pouring consistency than a gratin binder, which suits a dish where it must soak through the crumb layers. The original specifies no seasoning at all; add salt and pepper, and nutmeg if you want it.
- Bread crumbsFresh crumbs torn from a day-old loaf, not dry commercial ones, which will drink the sauce and go pasty. "Well buttered" means tossed with melted butter until they just glisten, roughly 3 tbsp per cup.
- Baking in the shellsDeep sea-scallop shells are rarely sold with the meat now. Any ovenproof ramekin works; if you do use shells, scrub them and set them on a sheet pan so they don't tip.
- Which scallopsBuy "dry" scallops, untreated with sodium tripolyphosphate. Treated ones leach liquid into the dish and will not brown. Bay scallops can be used whole; large sea scallops are better halved crosswise so the layers sit flat.
Scalloped dishes are generally said to take their name from the shell itself: through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries "to scallop" is often traced to the practice of baking something in a shell or shell-shaped dish with crumbs, and the word is thought to have spread from the mollusk to potatoes, oysters and anything else layered in a buttered dish, though the explanation is contested. The instruction "if you have the shells" reflects a reader who might well have bought them whole. Recipes of this era are also often said to assume the cook can judge a dish by eye, which may be why quantities, seasoning and oven heat are all left unstated here; the printed page was a reminder rather than a set of directions.