Cream Scallops
1 pint scallops, fresh or canned 1 pint thin white sauce Wash and drain the scallops, add them to the sauce and cook about fifteen minutes in a double boiler.
A plain creamed shellfish dish of the sort that filled out a lunch or supper menu. The only real problem is the cooking time.
- Cut the cooking timeFifteen minutes turns scallops into erasers. Bring the white sauce to a bare simmer, add the scallops off the direct heat, and give them two to three minutes for bay scallops or four for large sea scallops, until they are just opaque through.
- A pint of scallopsMeasured by volume rather than weight, as was usual for shellfish sold shucked and swimming. Reckon about 1 lb of shucked scallops, which fills a pint measure once drained.
- Thin white sauceThe period standard is 1 tablespoon butter and 1 tablespoon flour to 1 cup milk, so a pint means 2 tablespoons of each to 2 cups milk. It is deliberately loose, more sauce than gravy.
- Canned scallopsThese are hard to find in most markets now, and they were already cooked in the can. Fresh or thawed frozen scallops are the substitute, and they need less time still.
- Wash and drainWorth doing properly: pull off the tough crescent of muscle on the side of each scallop, and pat them dry so they do not water down the sauce.
- The double boilerIt was there to stop the milk sauce catching and scorching. A heavy-bottomed saucepan over low heat does the same job and gives you enough control to pull the scallops the moment they set.
- SeasoningThe recipe gives none. Salt, white pepper, a scrape of nutmeg or mace, and a squeeze of lemon at the end are all in keeping with the period.
- Yield and servingServes four as a light main course. Spoon over toast points, into puff-pastry shells, or into scallop shells with buttered crumbs browned briefly under the broiler.
Creamed shellfish in a thin white sauce was one of the workhorses of American cookery between roughly 1880 and 1930. Butterick, best known for dress patterns, published household compendiums aimed at the same readership as its magazines, and the terse style here is characteristic of a book meant to be scanned rather than studied. The confident mention of canned scallops is a period marker: by the early twentieth century canned and shucked shellfish moved inland by rail, and a cook far from the coast could put a fish course on the table with nothing fresher than a tin and a bottle of milk. The long cooking time is markedly longer than modern practice would suggest.