No. 939

Scollop, Oyster, Clam, or Mussel Patties

Bouchees de Petoncles, d'Huitres, Lucines ou Moules

Blanch oysters or clams in their own juice. Cook mussels in white wine with pepper and a few drops of vinegar; scollops in a little white wine. Drain and cut either of these into quarter inch squares, fry them in some butter on a hot fire, and cover with a veloute sauce (No.415) thickening the sauce with egg-yolks, and fresh butter. Fill the patties and serve them very hot.

← No. 938 Patties a la Reine Hot Side Dishes No. 940 Sweetbread Patties, French Style →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer assumes you already have velouté (his No. 415) and baked puff-paste shells on hand; the recipe itself is really a method for a rich shellfish filling. Two things decide whether it works: cooking the shellfish barely at all, and keeping the finished sauce below a simmer once the yolks go in.

Do not cook the shellfish twice"Blanch" here means 30 to 60 seconds in the liquor, just until the edges of oysters ruffle or clams open. They then get a quick turn in butter and sit in hot sauce, which is more than enough heat. Shellfish held longer at any stage tightens into rubber.
The hinge: the egg-yolk liaisonOnce yolks are stirred into the velouté it must not boil, or it will curdle and separate. Temper the yolks with a ladle of hot sauce, return them off the heat, and hold the sauce hot but never bubbling; whisk the cold butter in last, off the fire.
Bouchees and pattiesA bouchée is a small puff-paste case, roughly two inches across, baked blind with the centre lifted out. Frozen puff pastry vol-au-vent shells stand in exactly; fill them at the last moment or the pastry softens.
Petoncles and lucinesPetoncles are small bay-type scallops, not the large sea scallops sold today; if using sea scallops, cut them down to the quarter-inch dice he calls for. Lucines are small hard-shelled clams (family Lucinidae); littlenecks or cherrystones are a serviceable modern substitute.
Velouje in the original senseNo. 415 is a white stock (veal or chicken) thickened with a pale roux, not milk-based béchamel. Fish or shellfish stock makes a better match here, and the strained shellfish cooking liquor should go into it rather than down the drain.
Save the liquor, then reduce itThe oyster or clam juice and the mussel wine are the flavour of the dish. Strain through muslin to catch sand and shell, reduce by half, and add to the sauce; without this step the filling tastes of butter and yolk only.
SeasoningOyster and clam liquor is salty and mussel liquor saltier still, so salt the sauce only after the reduction is in. A little lemon juice or a few drops of the vinegar he uses for mussels keeps the yolk-and-butter richness from going flat.
YieldThe recipe gives no quantities. As a rough guide, a pint of diced shellfish with about as much sauce will fill a dozen or more two-inch cases; scale to the number of shells you have.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer's The Epicurean (1894) records the kitchen of Delmonico's in New York, where he was chef for more than thirty years, and this entry is typical of how the book is built: a single numbered formula that assumes the cook can already turn out velouté and puff-paste cases, and that differs from its neighbours only in what goes inside. Bouchées and vol-au-vent fillings of this kind were staples of the nineteenth-century service à la russe menu, passed as hot side dishes between the fish and the roast. The list of shellfish is a reminder of how cheap and abundant the New York bivalve trade then was — oysters especially, dredged from beds in the Hudson and Long Island Sound and sold by the barrel, were a working-class food that French technique could raise into a Delmonico's dish. Grouping scallops, clams, oysters and mussels under one method is also characteristic of Ranhofer's efficiency: what the sauce and the shells demand is uniform, so only the two minutes of pre-cooking changes.