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Shellfish: Scallops
Scalloped Scallops.
Cut scallops into small pieces and mix with cracker crumbs, beaten egg, and a little milk or cream, seasoning to taste. Fill shells, washed for the purpose, cover with crumbs, put a bit of butter on each, and bake delicately brown.
Fried Scallops.
Marinate the scallops in a mixture of oil, lemon juice, salt, and pepper.
Roll in cracker dust, then in egg, and again in cracker dust or white bread crumbs. Fry in smoking-hot fat to a golden color.
Scallops on the Shell.
Cut scallops into quarters, if large.
Place them in the scallop shells.
Dredge with salt, pepper, and chopped parsley, cover with chopped mushrooms, some bits of butter, a teaspoonful lemon juice for each shell, and bread crumbs moistened with butter. Place in a hot oven for ten or fifteen minutes.
Soft-Shell Crabs.
To prepare them for cooking, lift the shell at both edges and remove the gray, spongy substance, which can be plainly seen, then pull up the little triangular apronlike piece on under side of shell, wash and wipe the crabs dry, dip in milk, roll in flour, and fry in hot fat; or dip in beaten egg, roll in crumbs, and either fry or broil.
Partan Pies (a Scotch dish).
Pick the meat, after boiling from hard-shell crabs, clean the shells, mix the meat with a little pepper, a bit of butter, and bread crumbs; add 3 spoonfuls vinegar and put into the shells again; strew bread crumbs over, and set them in the oven. Serve when brown on top.
Crabs à la Creole (Southern recipe). 2 tablespoonfuls butter, 1 onion, 1 sweet Spanish pepper minced, 1 cupful strained tomato pulp, cupful chicken broth, 4 soft crabs.
Melt the butter, and cook for five minutes the onion and pepper; stir while frying, then add the tomato pulp, chicken broth, and the crabs cleaned and cut in two. Use celery salt in the seasoning, and simmer seven minutes.
Five short recipes with almost no timings, temperatures or quantities — typical of turn-of-the-century books that assumed the cook already knew the shape of the dish. The hinge in every one of them is restraint: scallops and soft crabs are done in minutes and turn to rubber if held longer.
- Scallop timing above allSea scallops need 6 to 10 minutes in a 425F oven, or about 90 seconds a side in fat, until barely opaque at the centre. The "ten or fifteen minutes" for Scallops on the Shell only works if the shells are shallow and the oven genuinely hot; check at eight.
- Oven temperaturesThe book gives no numbers. "A hot oven" in this period is usually taken as roughly 425-450F. "Bake delicately brown" implies something more moderate, around 375-400F. Partan Pies only need to brown on top, so 400F for 10-15 minutes should be enough.
- Smoking-hot fatRead this as 375F. Deep-frying fat that is actually smoking has passed its smoke point and will taste scorched; the phrase was shorthand for hot enough that the coating sets instantly.
- Cracker dustFinely rolled soda or water crackers, unsalted or lightly salted. Modern saltines work; crush to a coarse sand and reduce the added salt in the seasoning accordingly. Panko is not a substitute here — it stays too open to hold the marinade.
- Scallop shells as dishesThe shells are the baking vessel, not a garnish. Deep sea-scallop or coquille shells hold about 1/4 cup each; ramekins or a small gratin dish do the same job. Whatever you use, the mixture should sit no more than an inch deep or the outside overcooks.
- Sweet Spanish pepperA mild red bell pepper. In the Creole recipe it is cooked with the onion as the aromatic base, so mince it fine and give it the full five minutes to soften.
- Soft-shell crab cleaningThe "gray, spongy substance" is the gills, and the "apronlike piece" is the abdominal flap. Most fishmongers will clean them, but the crabs must be alive or very recently killed when cleaned; buy them the day you cook them and keep them cold.
- The vinegar in Partan PiesThree spoonfuls of vinegar is sharp by current taste, and the recipe never says how many crabs are involved. Start with one, taste, and add more; older recipes often used vinegar where we would now reach for lemon.
- YieldThe scallop dishes give no quantities, so any figure is guesswork. Crabs a la Creole, with its 4 soft crabs, serves two at two crabs each.
The word "scalloped" is usually explained by the shell itself: the fluted valve of the scallop was long used as a small baking dish, and any dish of chopped food bound with crumbs and browned in one took the name whether or not a scallop was involved — though this account is traditional rather than firmly documented. "Partan" is the Scots word, from Gaelic partan, for the common edible crab, and partan pies — dressed crab meat returned to the cleaned shell and browned — appear in Scottish household cookery well before this book, in Meg Dods and her successors. The Creole crab dish with its butter, onion, sweet pepper and tomato belongs to the same New Orleans repertoire that American general-purpose manuals were beginning to borrow from around 1900, usually labelled "Southern recipe" as it is here. Household Discoveries was a compendium rather than a cookbook proper, which may explain the telegraphic style: it gathered established dishes from regional and printed sources and trusted the reader to fill in the rest.