Home › The World's Kitchen › Fried Scallops, Tartare Sauce
Fried Scallops, Tartare Sauce
Prepare the same amount fried scallops and serve with a tartare sauce in a saucebowl separately.
This is a one-line variation that leans on the fried scallop recipe printed above it in the book; the only new information is the sauce. What follows fills in the parts the original assumes you already know.
- "The same amount"The quantity refers back to the preceding scallop recipe, which is not on this page. A pint of shucked scallops, roughly a pound, is a reasonable modern stand-in, enough for about four as a first course.
- The hinge: timingScallops are all but cooked through by the time the coating browns. In hot deep fat, breaded sea scallops need only two or three minutes, bay scallops less. Anything past that and the muscle tightens and squeaks.
- Dry them firstScallops shed a surprising amount of liquid. Blot them well before flouring or the breading slides off in the fat and the oil spits.
- The side muscleThe small tough tab on the side of each scallop is worth pulling off; it cooks to rubber.
- "Fried" in 1906"Fried" -- The preceding recipe, not reprinted here, carries the method. Period fried scallops were generally floured, egged and crumbed and cooked in deep fat, then drained on paper; treat any temperature or timing as the modern cook's own.
- Tartare sauce of the periodNot the sweet jarred product. It is mayonnaise beaten stiff with chopped capers, gherkins or pickled cucumber, shallot or onion, and parsley, sharpened with a little vinegar or lemon. Made from scratch it contains uncooked egg; use pasteurized eggs if serving anyone frail, or a good commercial mayonnaise as the base.
- SaucebowlSimply a small sauceboat or ramekin passed at table. Serving it apart keeps the cold sauce off the hot crust.
Fried scallops with tartare sauce sits squarely in the hotel and restaurant idiom that Alexander Filippini, long of Delmonico's in New York, was writing out of: a fried seafood, a cold emulsified sauce, sent to the table apart. Sauce tartare is generally traced to mid-nineteenth-century French kitchens, the name often said to derive from the vaguely eastern associations of dishes served "à la tartare" rather than from any Tatar cooking, though that account is traditional rather than settled; by 1900 it was the standard accompaniment to almost anything crumbed and fried. The terseness of the entry may itself be a period detail: American cookbooks of the era are often described as being built around a base preparation followed by a string of one-line variations, on the assumption that a cook working from the book had already read the page above.