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Scallops Au Gratin
Mix and heat for half a minute two light tablespoons melted butter and three tablespoons flour. Pour in a half pint cold milk and mix until it comes to a boil. Plunge one and a half pounds very fresh scallops into a pint boiling water with half teaspoon salt and boil for five minutes. Take up a gill of this scallop broth and pour it into the sauce. Drain the scallops on a sieve and add them to the sauce. Season with a teaspoon salt, two saltspoons cayenne pepper, one saltspoon grated nutmeg, and pour in two tablespoons sherry. Mix well, cook for five minutes. Pour into a baking dish, sprinkle two tablespoons grated Parmesan cheese over, divide half ounce of butter in little bits on top and set in the oven to bake for ten minutes. Remove and serve.
A plain white sauce enriched with scallop broth and sherry, gratinéed under cheese. The measurements are Edwardian and the cooking times are far too long for scallops; both need adjusting.
- The hinge: scallops cook in minutesAs written the scallops boil five minutes, simmer another five in the sauce, then bake ten more. Twenty minutes of heat turns them into erasers. Poach them barely 60-90 seconds until just opaque, fold them into the finished sauce off the heat, and let the oven do nothing but brown the top.
- Archaic measuresA gill is half a cup. A saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so two saltspoons of cayenne is a half teaspoon — assertive but not absurd. Half a pint of milk is one cup.
- SaltHalf a teaspoon goes into the poaching water and a full teaspoon into a sauce built on one cup of milk, plus Parmesan. Start with a quarter teaspoon in the sauce and correct at the end; the scallop broth and cheese carry more salt than the original allows for.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given at all, as is usual in recipes of this period. For a ten-minute gratin you want 425-450F, or simply run it under the broiler for two or three minutes until the cheese blisters.
- Scallop brothThe gill of poaching liquid is the point of the whole method — it is what makes this taste of scallops rather than of béchamel. Strain it, and if it seems thin, reduce the pint down before measuring out the half cup.
- RouxThree tablespoons of flour to two of butter is flour-heavy; the sauce will be stiff before the broth goes in. Either even them up at three and three or expect a thick, spoon-coating result.
- CheeseTwo tablespoons of grated Parmesan over a whole baking dish is a thin veil. Use a hard aged wedge and grate it fresh rather than pre-grated.
- YieldA pound and a half of scallops serves four as a main course, six as a first course. This recipe calls for a single baking dish, though the same mixture can be divided among scallop shells.
Au gratin means only that a dish is finished with a browned crust — from the French gratter, to scrape, traditionally explained as the crust scraped from the pan. The formula of white sauce, shellfish, grated cheese and a hot oven was applied widely in this period to crab, lobster and sweetbreads alike. Worth noting that the American trade has long sold only the adductor muscle of the scallop, much of it shucked at sea, while European cooks kept the roe and the whole animal in the shell — which is why a recipe like this treats scallops as small uniform cylinders to be poached and sauced rather than as something to be served on the half shell.