Scallop Salad
Mix two cups of cold cooked scallops cut in small pieces, one cup of celery cut in shreds, with mayonnaise dressing. Chill one hour. Serve in nests of lettuce. Garnish with mayonnaise, chopped olives and chopped chives. roe.
A four-line composed salad of the kind that filled the salad chapter of American books around 1900. Almost everything rides on how the scallops are cooked before they ever reach the bowl.
- The hinge: barely cook the scallops"Cold cooked scallops" is doing all the work here, and the book assumes you know that scallops are done in two to three minutes in barely simmering court-bouillon or salted water. Anything past that and they turn to rubber, which chilling and mayonnaise will not disguise. Drain, spread on a plate, and cool quickly rather than letting them sit in hot liquid.
- QuantityTwo cups of cut scallops is roughly a pound of raw scallops before cooking, allowing for shrinkage. Sea scallops cut into three or four pieces each work better than bay scallops, which are small enough to disappear into the dressing.
- The stray word "roe"The trailing "roe." looks like a printer's orphan, possibly the tail of the garnish list. Scallops sold in the United States today are shucked to the adductor muscle alone, so the roe is generally unavailable; ignore the word.
- MayonnaiseThe period dressing is a hand-beaten oil-and-yolk mayonnaise, thicker and more acid than jarred. If you make your own, use pasteurized eggs, since nothing in this salad is cooked after the dressing goes in. Bought mayonnaise thinned with a spoonful of lemon juice is a fair stand-in.
- Celery "cut in shreds"This means lengthwise strips, not the transverse half-moons of modern practice — cut the ribs into 2-inch lengths and then into narrow batons. It keeps the celery crisp against the soft scallop.
- Nests of lettuceCupped outer leaves of butter or iceberg lettuce, arranged as a bowl on each plate. Chill the leaves separately; the hour of chilling applies to the dressed scallop mixture, and lettuce dressed early goes limp.
- YieldServes four as a first course or a light lunch. The original gives no number, as was often the case in period salad recipes.
Lowney's Cook Book was compiled by Maria Willett Howard and issued by the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston, a chocolate manufacturer that, like Baker's and Rumford, put out a full general cookbook as advertising — the chocolate recipes sold the product, the rest sold the book. A scallop salad belongs squarely to the New England coast the company published from: sea scallops were landed in quantity in Massachusetts and Maine, and shellfish bound in mayonnaise and served in lettuce cups was a standard genteel luncheon dish of the era, sitting alongside lobster, crab and chicken salads made to the same formula.