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Scallops, Brestoise
Place in a saucepan one and a half pounds very fresh scallops with gill white wine, gill water, half teaspoon salt and saltspoon cayenne pepper. Cover pan and boil five minutes. Place a finely chopped white onion in a saucepan with tablespoon melted butter and fry five minutes. Add tablespoon flour, stir well, then strain liquor of the scallops into this pan, mix with a wooden spoon until it comes to a boil. Add three tablespoons fresh bread crumbs, a half bean chopped garlic and a teaspoon freshly chopped parsley; mix well. Finely chop scallops, add to sauce with an egg yolk, sharply mix and cook five minutes. Pour preparation into a dish and let get cold. Divide the scallops into six large scallop shells, smooth surface to dome-shaped forms, sprinkle a little bread crumbs and arrange a few little bits butter over them; place in a tin and bake in oven twelve minutes. Remove and serve.
A Breton-style stuffed scallop shell: the scallops are poached, chopped and bound in their own liquor with a thick onion-and-crumb sauce, then piled back into shells and browned. Most of the work can be done a day ahead, since the mixture has to go cold before it will hold a dome.
- GillA gill is half a cup (4 fl oz). So half a cup of white wine and half a cup of water for the poaching liquid.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. A quarter teaspoon of cayenne in this quantity is assertive but not unreasonable; scale back to an eighth if you are cautious.
- A half bean of garlic"Bean" is most likely a rendering of the French gousse (pod/clove). Half a clove, finely chopped.
- Poaching timeFive minutes at a boil will toughen scallops badly, and they are cooked again twice afterwards. Bring the liquid to a simmer, drop the scallops in for about a minute until barely opaque, and lift them out; the liquor is what the recipe actually needs from this step.
- The bindingThe sauce must be thick enough to mound. A tablespoon of flour plus three tablespoons of crumbs against a cup of liquid gives a stiff paste — cook it until it pulls from the side of the pan, or the shells will slump in the oven.
- The egg yolkTake the pan off direct heat before the yolk goes in and stir hard, then return it briefly. Five minutes of boiling after the yolk is added will curdle it.
- OvenNo temperature is given. Use 425F: the filling is already cooked and cold, and you want the crumbs and butter to colour in twelve minutes rather than dry the mixture out. A minute under the broiler at the end helps.
- ShellsSix deep scallop shells, or six shallow ramekins. Set them on a rimmed tray so they cannot tip.
- YieldSix shells, which is a first course for six or a light lunch for three.
The name points to Brest, the naval port at the western tip of Brittany, and the dish belongs to the same family as coquilles Saint-Jacques — scallops cooked, chopped, bound in a sauce and returned to their own shells to be browned. Brittany and Normandy were, and remain, the centre of the French scallop fishery, and the shell itself is the badge of Saint James, carried home by pilgrims from Compostela.