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Scallop Salad
Put the scallops into a basin of salted water and steep them for an hour, then rinse them in plenty of cold water and boil gently for twenty-five minutes. When cooked plunge the scallops into cold water, then drain and cut them into slices. Cut up the white stalks of a head of celery, put them in a salad-bowl, add the scallops, pour over them a mayonnaise dressing, and serve.
A plain composed salad from the Waldorf's kitchen, with one instruction that no modern cook should follow as written.
- The twenty-five minutesThis is the hinge. Scallops are done when the flesh turns from translucent to opaque, which takes two to three minutes in barely simmering water for sea scallops and less than a minute for bay scallops. Twenty-five minutes reduces them to rubber; the cold plunge Oscar calls for is still worth doing, to stop carryover cooking and firm them for slicing.
- The hour in salted waterThe soak was presumably meant to purge grit, and scallops of the period may well have reached the cook less thoroughly cleaned than today's. A commercially shucked scallop needs no soaking at all, only a rinse and a hard pat dry.
- Dry vs. wet scallopsMuch of what is sold now is treated with sodium tripolyphosphate, which makes the meat waterlogged and slightly soapy and causes it to weep into the dressing. Ask for dry-packed, or diver scallops, which will look ivory or faintly pink rather than stark white.
- SlicingLarge sea scallops slice neatly into two or three coins across the grain once chilled. Bay scallops are best left whole.
- The celery"White stalks" means the pale inner heart, which is tender and mild. Cut it on a slant into thin crescents; the outer green ribs are too stringy for a raw salad unless peeled.
- The dressingA period mayonnaise is thick, lemon-sharp and made with raw yolk. If you are making it by hand, use pasteurised eggs when serving anyone elderly, pregnant or immunocompromised, or use a good bottled mayonnaise loosened with lemon juice.
- Yield and servingThe recipe gives no quantities; roughly a pound of scallops with one celery heart will make four first-course portions. Dress it just before it goes to the table, as the celery softens and the mayonnaise thins as it stands.
Oscar Tschirky ran the Waldorf's dining rooms during the decades when American hotel cookery was translating French service for a New York clientele, and this salad shows the formula clearly: a cooked shellfish, a crisp raw vegetable, mayonnaise, nothing else. It is the same architecture as the Waldorf salad, which takes its name from the hotel and is traditionally attributed to him, and as the lobster and shrimp salads that filled the cold sections of hotel menus around 1900. Scallops are often said to have been an ordinary Atlantic coast catch rather than a luxury then, and to have been boiled outright, the treatment given here; the modern instinct to sear them hard and serve them barely set belongs to a much later kitchen.