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Scallops, Baton Rouge
Place one and a half pounds very fresh scallops in a saucepan with one gill white wine, two branches parsley and a half teaspoon salt, boil for five minutes, then take up parsley. Lightly brown six finely chopped shallots in two tablespoons melted butter in small saucepan, then add two Spanish sweet red peppers cut in small pieces, and cook for three minutes. Add a teaspoon flour, mix well, strain scallop liquor into this pan, add a tablespoon tarragon vinegar and mix until it comes to a boil. Add scallops, mix lightly, cook for five minutes longer, pour scallops into a deep, hot dish and serve.
A simple white-wine scallop sauté with a pimiento-shallot sauce. The one thing to fix is the cooking time: as written the scallops spend ten minutes over heat and will come out rubbery.
- The timing is the hingeScallops are done when they turn opaque, which takes about two minutes in simmering liquid and a minute or so more in the finished sauce. Poach them briefly, lift them out, build the sauce with the liquor, and return them at the very end just to heat through.
- A gillHalf a cup, four fluid ounces. Use a dry white you would drink — the wine is most of the sauce.
- "Very fresh scallops"Buy dry-packed sea scallops if you can; wet-packed ones are treated with sodium tripolyphosphate, weep liquid, and will thin the sauce and dull the flavour. Pull off the small tough side muscle before cooking.
- ShallotsSix shallots is a large quantity for a pound and a half of scallops. In Louisiana kitchens of this period "shallots" often meant green onions, which would make the amount reasonable; with true shallots, three or four is plenty.
- Spanish sweet red peppersMost likely pimientos — jarred or canned sweet red peppers, not anything hot. Drain them and cut them small, as the recipe says.
- Tarragon vinegarStill sold, and worth seeking out; it carries the dish. Plain white wine vinegar with a few crushed tarragon leaves steeped in it for an hour is a fair stand-in.
- The thickeningOne teaspoon of flour into roughly half a cup of strained liquor plus vinegar gives a very loose sauce that just coats. If you want it to cling, cook the flour in the butter a full minute before the liquid goes in, or reduce the finished sauce before the scallops return.
- Yield and servingA pound and a half of scallops serves three as a main course or four as a first course. The "deep, hot dish" matters — there is enough sauce to want rice, boiled potatoes or bread alongside.
The name places this among the many regional American dishes that The International Cook Book gathered under the banner of the world's kitchen, and its construction is straightforwardly Franco-Louisianan: a wine poach, a butter-and-flour liaison, shallots, tarragon vinegar, and the sweet red pepper that Gulf Coast cooks used freely once canned Spanish pimientos became a common pantry item in the early twentieth century. The vinegar finish suits the period — tarragon vinegar was a common sharpener in sauces of this kind, and it appears in American and French cookbooks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Whether the dish has any real connection to Baton Rouge or was simply given a Louisiana name for colour is impossible to say; cookbooks of this era attached place names to house recipes with a very free hand.