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Scallops En Casserole
1/2 pint (I cup) white stock 2 heaping tablespoonfuls (2 ozs.) butter 1/4 pint (1/2 cup) cream I small onion 2 shallots I heaping tablespoonful (I oz.) flour 3 egg yolks 3 chopped mushrooms Some small pieces puff pastry Salt, pepper, and red pepper to taste Put the scallops and mushrooms into a casserole with one tablespoonful of the butter, cover, and let cook for ten minutes.
Peel and chop finely the onion and shallots, blanch them in water, and drain.
Put them into an earthenware pan with the remainder of the butter and cook until a light brown color; stir in the flour, mix for a few minutes over the
The text as printed breaks off mid-sentence and the ingredient list never states how many scallops to buy, so treat this as a sauce method rather than a complete set of instructions. Everything below assumes about 1 to 1 1/2 lb of shucked scallops for the quantities given.
- The hinge: the yolksThree egg yolks are a liaison, not a custard base. Once they go in, the sauce must be held below a simmer — around 175F at most — or it will scramble and break. Temper them with a ladle of the hot sauce first, then return the mixture off the heat.
- Do not cook the scallops ten minutesTen minutes covered in butter will turn them to erasers. Sear or gently stew them 1 1/2 to 2 minutes until barely opaque, lift them out, and add them back only when the sauce is finished and off the heat. The liquor they release should go into the sauce.
- "Casserole" hereOn this page a casserole appears to be a lidded earthenware or flameproof pot used directly over the heat rather than a baking dish: the scallops are put in it with butter, covered, and cooked. Any heavy saucepan or enamelled cast-iron pot serves; the second "earthenware pan" for the onions is simply another pan.
- MeasuresThe parenthetical conversions follow the American pint: 1/2 pint is 1 cup, 1/4 pint is 1/2 cup. Butter at 2 oz is 4 level tablespoons (the text calls it 2 heaping tablespoonfuls); flour at 1 oz is a scant 1/4 cup.
- White stockA pale unroasted stock — veal or chicken. For scallops, a light fish stock or the scallop liquor topped up with chicken stock is closer to what the dish wants.
- Red pepperPeriod shorthand for cayenne. A pinch, added at the end; it is there to sharpen the cream, not to make the dish hot.
- Blanching the aromaticsOnion and shallot are blanched here to take the raw edge off them. You can skip it and simply sweat them in the butter, stopping short of any real browning so the sauce stays pale.
- The puff pastry"Some small pieces puff pastry" most likely means fleurons, crescents or diamonds baked separately and set around the dish at serving, though the text breaks off before saying so. The book gives no oven temperature; a hot oven, around 400F, will raise them.
- Finishing, since the text stopsThe intended sequence is clear enough: cook the flour and butter briefly, whisk in the stock, simmer to thicken, add the cream, draw off the heat, bind with the yolks, season, then fold in the scallops and mushrooms. Serves four as a first course.
Casserole cookery had a vogue in Britain and America, when small books of this kind appeared to sell the virtues of the covered earthenware pot. This particular dish is a plain descendant of the French treatment of scallops mwhite sauce enriched with cream and egg yolks — the same family as coquilles Saint-Jacques, which is generally traced to the scallop shell carried by pilgrims to Santiago de Compostela. The pastry fleurons and the yolk liaison are both marks of professional French practice being scaled down for a domestic cook, and the vagueness about how many scallops to buy may reflect a style of writing that assumed the reader knew what a serving looked like.