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Fried Scallops with Bacon
Procure one and a half pounds fine fresh scallops. Clean them well, lay them on a dish and season with one teaspoon salt and a half teaspoon white pepper. Mix the seasoning will in. Sprinkle two ounces flour over them and thoroughly mix again. Beat up two eggs in a bowl, roll the scallops thoroughly in the eggs, then roll them well in bread crumbs. Have some boiling fat on the range, place the scallops in the frying basket, shake them well, then fry until they have obtained a nice golden colour. Take them up and drain thoroughly. Sprinkle half teaspoon salt over equally. Dress on a hot dish with a folded napkin. Place six thin slices of bacon over them and serve.
A straightforward deep-fried scallop, written in the shorthand of a professional kitchen where the frying kettle was always hot and the garnish was assumed. Two things need spelling out: the fat temperature and the bacon.
- The hinge: keep the frying briefScallops are cooked through in about 2 minutes at 375F, by which time the crumb coating will be golden. Waiting for a deeper colour squeezes the water out of them and leaves them rubbery and shrunken.
- "Boiling fat"This means deep fat at roughly 360-375F, not fat at boiling point. Use enough to float the scallops freely, and fry in two batches so the temperature does not crash.
- The bacon is meant to be cookedThe original simply says to lay six thin slices over the dish, which almost certainly means rashers already grilled or pan-fried crisp; raw bacon draped on hot scallops is neither safe nor palatable.
- Two ounces flourAbout a scant half cup. It is there only to dry the surface so the egg clings; excess should be shaken off before the egg wash.
- Scallop size and moistureSea scallops of even size work best; buy dry-packed if you can, since chemically treated wet-packed scallops shed liquid and steam inside the crust. Pat them thoroughly dry and pull off the tough side muscle before seasoning.
- "Clean them well"Scallops of this period could reach the kitchen whole or roughly shucked, in which case cleaning meant removing viscera, membrane and grit. A modern shucked scallop needs only a rinse and a dry.
- SaltOne teaspoon before breading and a half teaspoon after is on the generous side for 1.5 lb, and the bacon adds more. Hold back the finishing salt until you taste one.
- The folded napkinA linen napkin folded on the platter absorbed frying fat and kept the crust from sitting in it, which is worth imitating in some form. The recipe gives no yield; the six slices of bacon suggest it was portioned for six.
Scallops came late to American home cookery and early to hotel menus, which is where a book like this collects them: the frying basket, the finishing sprinkle of salt and the platter dressed on a folded napkin are restaurant service conventions rather than domestic ones. The pairing with bacon is old and practical, since a lean, faintly sweet shellfish takes well to salt fat. European kitchens of the period generally treated the scallop as a shell dish, poached and gratinated in its own shell in the manner named for St. James; the American preference, visible here, was for the whole muscle breaded and dropped in deep fat, the same treatment being given at the time to oysters, clams and soft-shell crabs.