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Scallop Salad
One pint of scallops, two cucumbers, one-half tablespoonful of salt, one tablespoonful of lemon juice, one bead of lettuce or cress, French or mayonnaise dressing, one onion.
Wash the scallops, then cook in boiling water with the salt and lemon juice half an hour. Drain, plunge into cold water, and when cold dry them in a napkin. Cut them in slices across the grain, and mix them with the sliced cucumbers. Cut the onion and rub it around the salad bowl, add the salad and pour over it a French or mayonnaise dressing. Garnish with lettuce leaves or cresses.
A straightforward composed salad from the era when shellfish were routinely boiled far longer than they needed. One timing correction transforms it.
- The half hour is the problemScallops are done in two to three minutes in simmering water — they turn from translucent to opaque and firm up. Thirty minutes reduces them to rubber. The instruction to slice them across the grain suggests large scallops; poached briefly, they need no slicing beyond halving big ones horizontally.
- A pint of scallopsShellfish were sold by volume; a pint of shucked scallops is roughly a pound. Small bay scallops were commercially important on the Atlantic coast in this period and are best left whole, though the recipe's slicing instruction suggests larger scallops were also in view.
- Salt and lemon in the waterThe recipe does not say how much water to use; use enough to cover and season it so it tastes lightly of the sea. The lemon juice helps keep the flesh white.
- "One bead of lettuce"A printer's error for head. Cress here means garden or watercress, used as a garnish rather than a base.
- The onionCut it and rub the cut face around the bowl, then discard it — this is a nineteenth-century trick for a whisper of onion without pieces of it in the salad. Do not chop it in.
- Dry them properlyThe napkin step matters more than it sounds. Wet scallops dilute the dressing and it slides off; blot them thoroughly and dress them while still slightly cool, not cold from the refrigerator.
- CucumbersOne large cucumber, peeled and seeded, or two Persian ones, gives about the right proportion to a pint of scallops. Salt the slices briefly and drain if they are watery.
- YieldServes four as a first course, two as a light lunch.
Ninety-Nine Salads belongs to a wave of turn-of-the-century American cookery that treated the salad as a course worth ninety-nine variations rather than an afterthought of lettuce — a shift often attributed to the influence of French service. Scallops were an inexpensive coastal shellfish in this period, and sold shucked by the pint, which is why the measurement here is volumetric rather than by weight. The rubbing of a cut onion around the bowl and the drying of cooked shellfish in a napkin are both older kitchen habits carried over from mid-century household manuals; the long boiling may reflect a concern, no longer shared, that shellfish required thorough cooking to be wholesome.