No. 1074

Scallops a la Brestoise

Petoncles a la Brestoise

Cook the scallops in a sautoir with white wine and half as much mushroom liquor, drain and chop them well. Fry in butter without coloring, finely cut up onions, moisten with the scallop broth, add fresh breadcrumbs, and let cook slowly for ten minutes, then add well-chopped lobster coral, fine herbs, salt, nutmeg, a dash of cayenn0e, a piece of butter and the chopped scallops; mix thoroughly and with this preparation garnish the scallop shells full and rounded on top; besprinkle with fresh bread-crumbs, pour over a little butter, and set them in a moderate oven; when a fine color, dress crown-shaped on folded napkins with sprigs of parsley in the center.

← No. 1073 Oysters with Parmesan Fried in Oil Scallops No. 1075 Scallops a la Havraise →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer assumes a professional brigade and a fishmonger who will hand over lobster coral on request. The dish is essentially a scallop gratin bound with bread rather than flour, and it stands or falls on not overcooking the shellfish.

Cook the scallops barely at allScallops firm up in about two minutes in simmering wine and turn to rubber shortly after. Poach them just until opaque at the edge, lift them out, and let the liquid keep reducing without them; they get a second cooking in the oven.
SautoirA straight-sided shallow pan, the ancestor of the modern sauté pan. Any wide pan that lets the wine reduce quickly will do.
Mushroom liquorThe strained cooking liquid from mushrooms cooked in butter and a little water, a standing preparation in a nineteenth-century kitchen. Soaking liquid from dried mushrooms, strained, is the nearest thing most cooks will have; use half as much as the wine, as directed.
Lobster coralThe dark green roe of a female lobster, which turns coral red on cooking. It is a by-product of breaking down whole lobsters and is rarely sold separately; ask a fishmonger, or leave it out. Without it the filling loses colour and a good deal of its character, so this is a dish to make when you have lobster shells to work with anyway.
Fine herbsFines herbes: chopped parsley, chervil, chives and tarragon in roughly equal parts. Parsley and chives alone are a reasonable stand-in.
Cayenn0eA typesetting slip for cayenne. A dash means a dash — the pepper is there to sharpen the sweetness of the scallop, not to be tasted as heat.
OvenA moderate oven is conventionally taken as around 350F; Ranhofer gives no figure. At that temperature the crumbs will take a long time to colour on a shallow filling; 400F, or a minute under the broiler at the end, gets the "fine color" Ranhofer wants without drying the scallops out.
The shellsDeep scallop shells, scrubbed and boiled, are the intended vessel and are still sold by kitchen suppliers; small gratin dishes or ramekins work. Fill them domed, as instructed — the mixture does not rise.
YieldThe original gives no quantities at all. As a first course, reckon on about 1 lb of scallops, a cup of wine, half a cup of mushroom liquor, one small onion and a cup of fresh crumbs for four to six filled shells.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's record of thirty years' cooking at Delmonico's in New York, and it is organised like a professional reference rather than a home cookbook — numbered formulas, cross-references, and an assumption that the reader already has mushroom liquor and lobster coral on hand. À la brestoise points to Brest, the naval port at the western tip of Brittany and the heart of French scallop country; the great coquille Saint-Jacques beds lie in the Bay of Saint-Brieuc and off the Breton coast, and dishes carrying Breton place-names in nineteenth-century French kitchens are often said to be shellfish dishes. Serving a chopped, bound filling back in its own shell was a familiar restaurant treatment of scallops and oysters of the period, and the final flourish here — shells dressed crown-shaped on a folded napkin with parsley in the middle — is pure Delmonico's dining room, where how a platter arrived at the table mattered as much as what was on it.