Home › The World's Kitchen › Scallops Au Gratin, Virginia
Scallops Au Gratin, Virginia
Plunge a pound and a half fresh scallops in a pint boiling water with teaspoon salt, boil for five minutes and drain on a sieve, saving one gill of the liquor. Mix in a saucepan one and a half tablespoons butter and two tablespoons flour, stir well while heating for one minute, then pour in a gill hot milk, half gill cream and the gill of liquor. Sharply mix until it comes to a boil, add the scallops, season with a light teaspoon salt, two saltspoons cayenne, saltspoon grated nutmeg and mix well.
Cut two ounces raw Virginia ham into thin, small square pieces, add them to the scallops, mix well, then pour in a baking dish. Sprinkle two tablespoons grated Parmesan cheese over, arrange a few little bits of butter on top, then set in oven for ten minutes or until a nice brown colour, remove and serve.
A straightforward cream gratin, but the timings belong to an era when scallops were cooked until firm. The hinge is heat control: everything else here is forgiving.
- Overcooking is the real riskFive minutes in boiling water plus ten in the oven will turn scallops rubbery. Poach them 60-90 seconds, just until opaque at the edges, or skip the poach entirely, reserve half a cup of bottled clam juice or light stock in place of the liquor, and let the oven finish them.
- Gills and saltspoonsA gill is half a cup (4 fl oz), so the sauce takes 1/2 cup hot milk, 1/4 cup cream and 1/2 cup of the cooking liquor. A saltspoon is about 1/4 teaspoon.
- The cayenneTwo saltspoons is roughly half a teaspoon of cayenne in about a cup and a quarter of sauce, which is aggressively hot by modern taste. A quarter teaspoon reads as warmth rather than heat; adjust upward if you want the original's bite.
- Oven temperatureNone is given because the browning is the cue. Use 425F, or run the dish under the broiler for 2-3 minutes, which browns the Parmesan without cooking the scallops further.
- "Raw Virginia ham"This means dry-cured, salt-aged country ham, sliced thin and uncooked -- closer to prosciutto than to a supermarket boiled ham. Prosciutto or Serrano is the nearest easy substitute; if you use a wet-cured cooked ham the dish loses its salt-and-smoke backbone.
- SaltBetween the salted poaching water, the light teaspoon in the sauce, the cured ham and the Parmesan, this can end up very salty. Season the sauce lightly and taste after the ham goes in.
- Scallops and their liquorDry-packed scallops give a cleaner, sweeter liquor; wet-packed ones shed cloudy phosphate water that will thin the sauce. Pull off the small tough side muscle before cooking.
- YieldA pound and a half serves four as a first course, or three as a light main with bread. Individual gratin dishes brown faster and more evenly than one deep baking dish.
The International Cook Book was compiled by Alexander Filippini, long a chef at Delmonico's in New York, and it takes the classical French repertoire and tags dishes with place names -- here a plain scallop gratin becomes "Virginia" by virtue of two ounces of ham. That shorthand suggests how much authority Virginia's dry-cured hams carried in American kitchens around 1900: the Smithfield and country hams of the Tidewater were among the native cured meats a French-trained chef might name on a menu, used in small salty quantities the way an Italian cook uses prosciutto. The gratin itself is standard practice of the period -- a b he ppairing of scallops with cured pork is old and widespread rather than particular to any one place.