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Fried Scallops
Trim off the beards and black parts, clean the scallops well and drain them. Put a lump of lard into a flat stewpan, place it over the fire until blue smoke rises, then put in the scallops and fry them until lightly browned. Drain them for a moment on a sheet of paper, arrange them on hot dish over which has been spread a folded napkin garnished with fried parsley, and serve.
A one-paragraph sauté that depends almost entirely on heat management: the fat must be hot enough that the scallops colour before their interiors tighten. Everything else is presentation.
- The hinge: fat first, then speed"Blue smoke" means the lard is very hot, at or near its smoke point (lard smokes somewhere in the region of 370-400F, depending on how it was rendered). Scallops go in dry, in a single uncrowded layer, and come out as soon as they are browned, a minute or two a side. Held longer they squeeze out water and turn to rubber.
- Beards and black partsOscar assumes whole scallops in the shell, complete with the frilly mantle and the dark digestive sac, both of which are trimmed away. Most American markets sell only the shucked adductor muscle, so there is usually nothing to clean; if you buy roe-on scallops from a European supplier, the orange coral is edible and the grey-black sac is not.
- Drain and dry"Clean well and drain" is doing real work. Pat the scallops thoroughly dry and, if they have been sitting in liquid, blot again just before frying. Wet scallops steam rather than brown.
- Wet-packed scallopsMuch supermarket scallop is treated with sodium tripolyphosphate, which makes it retain water and refuse to sear. "Dry" or "diver" scallops, ivory to pinkish rather than stark white, are the ones for this method.
- LardThe recipe calls simply for lard, and it works well here. Clarified butter, ghee or a neutral oil finished with a knob of butter substitute directly; whole butter alone will burn at this temperature.
- Flat stewpanA wide, shallow, straight-sided pan — a modern sauté pan or a heavy skillet. The point is surface area, not depth.
- Fried parsleyWhole flat-leaf sprigs, bone dry, dropped into the same hot fat for 10-15 seconds until they stop hissing and go translucent-crisp. Wet parsley will spit violently; stand back and use a splatter screen.
- The folded napkinA linen napkin on the platter absorbed the last of the frying fat and kept the dish from sliding. Paper towel under a warmed plate does the same job if you would rather not launder it.
- Yield and servingThe recipe gives no quantities; figure roughly 4 oz of sea scallops per person as a first course. Lemon wedges and a little coarse salt are all this needs.
Oscar Tschirky's Waldorf kitchen cooked in the French idiom of the 1890s, and this entry shows it: the folded napkin, the fried parsley garnish and the instruction to fry until "lightly browned" are all straight out of the professional repertoire of the period. The trimming of beards and black parts marks it as a recipe written when scallops arrived whole in the shell, as they still generally do in Europe; the American habit of shucking at sea and shipping only the adductor muscle is what made the scallop a convenience item. Scallop is coquille Saint-Jacques in French, named for the pilgrim badge of Santiago de Compostela, a shell traditionally said to have been worn by those who walked the route. Serving fried food on a napkin was standard hotel practice well into the twentieth century, when it quietly disappeared along with the laundry staff who made it possible.