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Cream of Scallop Soup
1/4 teaspoon peppercorns. Salt. 1 quart scallops 4 cups milk 2 cloves Bit of bay leaf 1 tablespoon chopped onion 5 tablespoons butter 1/4 cup flour
The book prints this as an ingredient list in the run of cream soups, leaving the method to the chapter's general directions for a cream soup: aromatics steeped in scalded milk, a butter-and-flour roux, and the shellfish added at the end. The proportions still work; the assumptions behind them need a little translation.
- Scallops go in last, and brieflyThis is the hinge. Scallops are cooked through in about two minutes in hot liquid; held longer they tighten into rubber and weep out their moisture. Chop or quarter them, add them off the heat or at a bare simmer, and serve at once.
- A quart of scallopsMeasured by volume, not weight — roughly 1 1/2 to 2 lb of shucked meats. In late nineteenth-century Boston this would most likely have been small bay scallops, sweeter and far smaller than the sea scallops sold today; sea scallops will need cutting down.
- Keep the liquorShucked scallops sit in their own liquid, and it is worth straining that liquid into the soup rather than discarding it; it carries flavour the milk alone will not supply.
- Scalding the milkThe two cloves, bay and chopped onion are steeped in the milk heated to just below the boil, then strained out. Whole cloves, not ground — they are meant to be removed, and two is deliberately restrained.
- The roux proportion1/4 cup flour to 4 cups milk works out at about a tablespoon of flour per cup, a thin white sauce — pourable rather than coating; note that the butter (5 tablespoons) exceeds the flour. Cook the flour in the butter a couple of minutes before the milk goes in or the soup will taste pasty.
- Seasoning is assumedNo salt or pepper is listed; the chapter's general directions would have supplied them. Season to taste once the milk is in.
- YieldFour cups of milk plus the scallops makes roughly six first-course servings.
Fannie Merritt Farmer's Boston Cooking-School Cook Book (1896) devotes a long stretch of its soup chapter to cream soups built on the same skeleton: milk scalded with an onion and a whisper of spice, thickened with a butter-and-flour roux, and finished with whatever the market offered — corn, celery, clams, oysters, scallops. The formula is a domesticated béchamel, and its repetition is the point: Farmer taught by system, expecting a cook who learned one cream soup to be able to make a dozen. Scallops were an obvious New England candidate, said to have been dredged from Cape Cod and Buzzards Bay and sold shucked in the Boston markets as small, sweet bay scallops. The clove-and-bay infusion of the milk is an inheritance from the older habit of scenting white sauces with a stuck onion — a practice at home in both English and French cooking — and it survives here in shorthand because Farmer's readers were expected to know what to do with it.