Home › Fish › Scalloped Scallops
Scalloped Scallops
1 pint scallops 4 tablespoons flour 1 cup mushrooms, chopped 1 cup cream 2 tablespoons onion ½ cup scallop liquor salt, pepper, cayenne 4 tablespoons butter Parboil scallops. Drain and cut in slices. Melt butter; add onion and mushrooms, cook five minutes; add scallops, cook five minutes; add liquids, cook until thick.
Place mixture in buttered baking dish or scallop shells; dot with butter; cover with buttered and seasoned crumbs; bake until crumbs are brown. /
A creamed scallop gratin with one significant gap: flour appears in the ingredient list but never in the method. Read the points below before you start.
- The missing flourThe 4 tablespoons of flour belong in the pan with the melted butter, onion and mushrooms — stir it in and cook a minute or two before the liquids go in, or it will lump. Adding cream and scallop liquor to an unfloured pan gives you a thin sauce that never thickens.
- Do not cook the scallops three timesAs written the scallops are parboiled, then fried five minutes, then baked. That is enough to make them tough and weepy. Blanch them only long enough to firm the outside and release their liquor (under a minute), then fold them into the finished sauce off the heat and go straight to the crumbs.
- A pint of scallopsScallops were sold by volume by the fishmonger; a pint is roughly 1 to 1¼ lb of shucked meats. Bay scallops need no slicing at all — the instruction to cut in slices assumes large sea scallops.
- Scallop liquorThe recipe does not say where the ½ cup of liquor comes from; the likeliest reading is the liquid given off during parboiling, strained. If your scallops are dry-packed and release little, make up the difference with fish stock or bottled clam juice rather than water.
- Oven heatThe recipe gives no temperature because it only needs to brown the top. Use 400F for about 15 minutes, or run it under the broiler for 2 to 3 minutes if the filling went in hot.
- Buttered crumbsToss fresh breadcrumbs with melted butter, salt and pepper before they go on. Dry crumbs scattered over the surface scorch in patches instead of browning evenly.
- CreamUse heavy cream. "Cream" was not a standardised product when this was written, and a light cream or half-and-half is more likely to break in the oven.
- YieldServes four as a main course, or six to eight in individual shells or ramekins as a first course.
Scalloped dishes appear to take their name from the shell rather than the shellfish: by the eighteenth or early nineteenth century "to scallop" was used of baking something in a shell or shell-shaped dish with crumbs, and the word was applied to oysters, potatoes and tomatoes as well as to scallops themselves. Serving the mixture in the deep half of the scallop shell was common in American and English cookery of this period, and cleaned shells were sold for kitchen use. The recipe belongs to a period fond of cream sauce thickened with a butter-and-flour roux, in which a plain boiled or blanched fish becomes a company dish by way of a sauce, mushrooms and a browned crumb top. Cayenne alongside salt and pepper is a common habit in recipes of the time.