Fried Scallops
flour crumbs Wash, drain, and parboil scallops. Season; dip in flour, egg and crumb, and fry in deep fat. Drain and serve with sauce tartare. Garnish with parsley and lemon.
A terse turn-of-the-century fry, written for a cook who already knew what "egg and crumb" meant. The one thing to reconsider is the parboiling.
- Skip the parboilScallops are more or less cooked by the time the crust colors, and pre-boiling them guarantees the rubbery, squeaky texture the dish is trying to avoid. Modern practice is to bread them raw and let the fat do all the cooking.
- The ingredient lineThe fragment "flour crumbs" at the top is probably what survives of a truncated ingredient list; the method itself calls for flour, egg and crumbs, so nothing is missing from it.
- Egg and crumbThe standard sequence: flour first so the egg clings, then beaten egg thinned with a spoonful of water or milk, then fine dry crumbs pressed on firmly. Resting the breaded scallops ten minutes in the refrigerator keeps the coating from sloughing off in the fat.
- Fat temperature"Deep fat" means a kettle of lard or oil; the book gives no figure, but roughly 375F works -- hot enough that a crumb sizzles instantly. Below that the crumbs soak; above it they darken before the inside is warm.
- TimingOne to two minutes, until the crust is deep gold. Sea scallops of the usual size need no more; bay scallops need less. Fry in small batches so the fat does not drop in temperature.
- Dry them wellAfter washing and draining, blot the scallops thoroughly. Wet scallops steam inside their coating and spit in the fat. If yours have the small tough side-muscle still attached, pull it off.
- Quantity and yieldThe recipe gives no amount. Figure about 1 1/2 lb of scallops for four as a main course, half that as a first course.
- Sauce tartareThe period version is simply mayonnaise with chopped capers, pickles or cucumber, onion and parsley folded in. Make it before you fry, since the scallops should go straight from the fat to the table.
Lowney's Cook Book (1907) was published by the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer, and Maria Willett Howard's collection is a New England household book through and through -- which is why a scallop recipe this brief could stand on its own. Along the Massachusetts coast scallops were an everyday market fish rather than a luxury, and the American habit of eating only the adductor muscle, discarding the roe that European cooks kept, is generally said to have been well established by this date. Egg-and-crumb frying in deep fat was the workhorse treatment for almost any small piece of fish in this era, and sauce tartare -- a mayonnaise sharpened with pickles and capers, generally traced to French service of the mid-nineteenth century -- was its near-automatic accompaniment. The instruction to parboil first is a step later cooks quietly abandoned.