Scallop Salad

The text as it survives here breaks off mid-sentence, after the soak and the beginning of the rinse. What remains is a preparation step, not a complete method, and it leaves the scallops raw.

• The recipe is a fragmentIt ends at "rinse" — there is no cooking, no dressing, no assembly and no quantity of scallops given. Anything beyond the soak would be guesswork on the reader's part.
• No cooking step survivesCold seafood salads of this kind were normally made with the shellfish cooked before dressing. No such step appears in what survives here, so the text as printed carries the scallops no further than a salt soak and a rinse.
• Raw scallop is not a safe defaultScallops eaten raw are only safe when the supplier has designated them for that use and the cold chain has been unbroken. Vibrio species and norovirus are the usual concerns, and a salt soak does nothing to either. Use a current recipe for scallop salad rather than reconstructing this one.
• The salt soak itselfA tablespoon of salt to a quart of water works out at roughly 2 percent, appreciably weaker than seawater. The recipe does not say what the soak is for; a brief brine of this sort is generally used to loosen grit and sand rather than to cure or preserve. Over an hour the muscle will firm and take on salt.
• Scallops then and nowSupermarket scallops today are the adductor muscle alone, frequently soaked in sodium tripolyphosphate, which makes them wet, faintly soapy and prone to steaming rather than searing. Dry-packed scallops are the ones worth buying.