No. 1075

Scallops a la Havraise

Petoncles a la Havraise

Pour white wine into a saucepan; add the scallops and take them off at the first boil; drain and mince them finely. Fry without coloring some chopped shallots, dredge over a little flour, add the minced scallops and their broth reduced; lobster coral and chopped up parsley. Fill well buttered scallop shells with this preparation, having them rounded on the top, strew over bread-crumbs, besprinkle with butter and color in a hot oven, then dress them on a napkin in a straight row, and garnish with sprigs of parsley.

← No. 1074 Scallops a la Brestoise Scallops No. 1076 Scallops a la Mariniere →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer gives no quantities and no temperatures, which is normal for The Epicurean — it was written for cooks who already knew the shape of the dish. The essentials are a very brief poach and a tight, well-reduced binding.

The hinge: "take them off at the first boil"The scallops go into the wine and come out the moment it trembles — 30 to 60 seconds, no more. They then bake again under the crumbs, so any real poaching at this stage gives you rubbery specks in the gratin.
Working quantitiesFor six shells, figure about 1 1/2 lb shucked scallops, 1 cup dry white wine, 2 tablespoons chopped shallot, 1 tablespoon flour, and 2 to 3 tablespoons butter through the whole preparation. This serves six as a first course.
"Color in a hot oven"Ranhofer gives no temperature; a hot oven is conventionally taken as roughly 425–450°F. The filling is already cooked; the oven is only there to brown the crumbs, so five to eight minutes is enough. A broiler does the same work faster.
Reducing the brothReduce the wine and scallop liquor hard — to a few tablespoons, syrupy — before it meets the flour and shallots. Scallops throw a lot of water, and an unreduced broth gives a filling that weeps in the shell.
Lobster coralThe raw green roe of a hen lobster, which turns coral red on cooking; it was a standard tinting and enriching agent in nineteenth-century kitchens. It is now rarely sold separately and appears only if you break down a whole female lobster. The dish works without it, at the cost of the color Ranhofer wanted.
Scallop shellsDeep scallop shells (coquilles) or small gratin dishes, buttered heavily. Mound the filling rather than leveling it — "rounded on the top" is what gives the browned crumb crust its shape.
The napkinServing shells on a folded napkin was a service convention rather than a garnish; it is usually explained as keeping hot shells from sliding on the platter. A rack or bed of coarse salt does the same job.
Sea scallops vs. bayRanhofer's pétoncles are small; large sea scallops are fine here since everything is minced, but mince by hand rather than in a processor or the filling turns pasty.

A Little History

Le Havre, at the mouth of the Seine, gave its name to a small family of Normandy-inflected seafood preparations. This is one of a run of consecutive scallop preparations in The Epicurean (1894), Charles Ranhofer's summing-up of more than thirty years as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and the run of them — Brestoise, Havraise, Marinière — shows how a New York luxury kitchen borrowed the coastal French port names as a shorthand for slight variations on one technique: poach, mince, bind, crumb, brown. Scallops served in their own shells go back well before Ranhofer, and long tradition ties them to Saint James of Compostela, whose pilgrims are often said to have worn the shell as a badge — an association that attaches to the name coquille Saint-Jacques, though coquille itself simply means shell.