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Scalloped Shrimps
Prepare one-half pint of tomato sauce, and put in with it one-half pint of picked shrimps, and one wineglassful of either red or white wine. Stir the above ingredients in a saucepan over the fire until hot, then turn them into a scallop dish; cover the top with finely grated breadcrumbs, put three or four lumps of butter over, and bake until browned. When well colored, take the dish out of the oven and serve the shrimps while hot.
A five-minute assembly that lives or dies on how long it sits in the oven. The shrimp are already cooked when they go in, so the bake is only there to brown the crumbs.
- The hinge: don't cook the shrimp twice"Picked shrimps" are shrimp that have already been boiled and shelled, so everything in the dish is done before it goes into the oven. Heat the sauce through, get the top colored, and pull it — eight to twelve minutes under a hot oven is plenty, and longer turns the shrimp to erasers.
- Half a pintOne cup, in both cases: a cup of tomato sauce and a cup of picked shrimp (a cup of cooked peeled shrimp runs around 5 oz by weight).
- A wineglassfulIn American cookbooks of this period a wineglass is about 2 fl oz, a quarter cup. That is a good deal of liquid against a cup of sauce; the brief stovetop heating is partly there to cook off the raw edge of the wine.
- Tomato sauceAlmost certainly a made sauce in the French manner — tomatoes cooked down with aromatics, commonly thickened with a light roux — not ketchup and not a garlicky pasta sauce. A thick, smooth, lightly seasoned tomato sauce is what the dish expects.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given at all; the instruction is simply to bake until browned. A hot oven, somewhere around 400–425F, will color crumbs over an already-hot filling, and a minute or two under the broiler at the end does the same job.
- A scallop dishOriginally a real scallop shell or a shallow oval gratin dish. Any shallow ovenproof dish will do — depth is the enemy here, since the point is maximum browned surface.
- Butter in lumpsThree or four lumps is perhaps a tablespoon or two in total, dotted over the crumbs so the fat runs through them as it melts. Without it the crumbs dry out rather than brown.
- YieldEnough for two as a main course or four as a first course.
Oscar Tschirky was never a cook — he ran the Waldorf's dining rooms — but the 1896 book that carries his name gathered the hotel's working repertoire, and this is a good example of its plainer end: a supper dish built from components a large kitchen always had on hand. "Scalloped" is generally traced to cooking and serving in a scallop shell, and by the late nineteenth century it had come to mean any dish baked in a shallow vessel under a crust of buttered crumbs. The recipe assumes a supply of "picked" shrimp — already boiled and shelled — which is why it reads as an assembly rather than a cooking method.