Home › Meat Substitutes › Scalloped Sea Kale
Scalloped Sea Kale
Cold boiled sea kale Bread crumbs Butter Pepper and salt When any sea kale is left, it can be cut into inch lengths and put into buttered scallop shells, with any remaining sauce and seasoning. Cover with bread crumbs; put bits of butter over the top, and bake in a hot oven for ten minutes.
A leftovers dish rather than a recipe from scratch: it assumes yesterday's boiled sea kale and its sauce are sitting in the larder. Ten minutes is only long enough to heat through and brown, so everything must go into the dish already cooked and already seasoned.
- A hot ovenRead this as roughly 400-450F. At that heat the crumbs should colour within the ten minutes; at lower temperatures the butter tends to soak in and the top stays pale.
- Scallop shellsReal shells, or any small shallow ovenproof dishes of roughly half-cup capacity. Individual gratin dishes or large ramekins behave the same way; a single shallow dish works but needs a few minutes longer.
- Finding sea kaleCrambe maritima is barely sold now, and wild coastal stands should be left alone. Blanched chard stems, cardoon, young leek whites or trimmed asparagus all take this treatment and cook to a similar tender-but-fibrous texture.
- "Any remaining sauce"In a book of this period that is likely to mean melted butter or a plain white or bechamel sauce, the usual accompaniments to boiled sea kale. If you have none, two or three tablespoons of thin bechamel per shell is enough to bind; too much and the crumbs sink.
- Crumbs and butterDried or day-old crumbs brown evenly here; fresh soft crumbs go greasy in this short a bake. Dot the butter generously and in small pieces so it spreads rather than pooling in one spot.
- If the top will not colourBecause the filling starts cold, the crumbs sometimes need help. Thirty seconds to a minute under the broiler at the end finishes them without overcooking the vegetable underneath.
- SeasoningBoiled sea kale is bland and the leftover sauce will have flattened as it cooled. Taste and correct the salt and pepper before it goes into the shells, not after.
- YieldFilled scallop shells of this size are a first course or a light supper dish; count two per person, or one alongside a larger plate.
Sea kale grows wild on the shingle beaches of northern Europe, and by the eighteenth century English gardeners were blanching it under pots and sand to force pale, tender shoots for the late-winter table, a practice often said to derive from the coastal habit of digging the shoots from under the drifted stones. It became a genteel spring vegetable, usually boiled and sent up on toast with melted butter or white sauce like asparagus, which is the kind of meal this recipe is clearing up after. The dish also shows the period's frugality plainly, since it exists only to use up what was left.