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Pepper (Teaspoon peppercorns Clean)
¼ teaspoon peppercorns Clean scallops, reserve one-half cup and finely chop remainder. Add these to milk, with seasonings and two tablespoons butter, and cook slowly twenty minutes. Strain and thicken with remaining butter and flour cooked together. Parboil reserved scallops, and add to soup. Serve with small biscuits or oysterettes.
A milk-based scallop soup built on the old New England pattern: flavor the milk with chopped scallops and aromatics, strain, thicken with a butter-and-flour roux, then return whole scallops at the last moment. The ingredient quantities have not survived on this page, so treat the amounts below as guidance rather than the book's own.
- The hinge: the reserved scallopsEverything depends on adding the half cup of whole scallops at the very end. Parboiled means dropped into simmering liquid for a minute or two, just until they turn opaque; held longer they tighten into rubber. Add them to the finished soup off direct heat and serve at once.
- ProportionsThe quantities are missing from this page. A soup of this type would run on the order of a pint of scallops to a quart of milk, with butter and flour for the thickening; the recipe itself specifies only that two tablespoons of butter go into the milk with the scallops and that the remaining butter is cooked with the flour. Any figures given here are conjecture, not the book's own.
- The peppercornsThe pepper measure is a fraction, almost certainly a quarter teaspoon of whole peppercorns, added to the milk for infusion and removed at the straining. Whole peppercorns are wanted here, not ground pepper, since the point is a clean background heat rather than speckle in a white soup.
- Cooking the milk slowlyTwenty minutes of scalding milk on a direct flame will scorch and give the whole soup a burnt undertone. Use a heavy pan over low heat, or set the pan in a wider pan of simmering water, and never let it reach a rolling boil.
- StrainingThe chopped scallops have given up their flavor by the end of the twenty minutes and are spent; press them well in the strainer and discard. A fine sieve is enough, but a sieve lined with cheesecloth gives a smoother result.
- ThickeningCook the butter and flour together two or three minutes without browning, then whisk in the hot strained milk a little at a time. Return to low heat until it just thickens, no more than five minutes, and taste for salt after thickening rather than before.
- Cleaning scallopsModern shucked scallops need only a rinse and the removal of the small tough side muscle, which the period text takes for granted. Dry-packed scallops are preferable; wet-packed ones carry added water and phosphate solution that can thin the soup.
- OysterettesThese were small branded oyster crackers of the period. Any plain oyster cracker or unsalted soda biscuit stands in.
- YieldAt the quantities above, roughly four generous cups — four first-course servings, or two as a supper.
White soups of scallops, oysters and clams thickened with a butter-and-flour roux are a staple of New England cookery of the period, and they reflect a coastline where shellfish were cheap and milk and cream were the standard enrichment rather than stock. The method here — sacrifice one portion of the shellfish to flavor the liquid, then poach a second portion briefly for texture — is the same logic behind oyster stew, and it survives because it solves a real problem: scallops give up their sweetness fast but toughen faster still. The recommendation of oysterettes is a small mark of the period, when branded crackers had begun to appear alongside home-baked biscuit in printed recipes.