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Scallops, Colbert
Place one and a half pounds fresh scallops in saucepan with half gill white wine and just enough water to cover them, season with half teaspoon salt and let boil for five minutes. Strain liquor into another saucepan and let reduce on open fire to a glaze, then pour in two light gills demi-glace, the juice of half a lemon and a half teaspoon freshly chopped parsley. Mix well and let briskly boil for ten minutes, shift pan to corner of range, incorporate little by little a half ounce fresh butter, and pour sauce into scallops pan. Mix well, then dress scallops in a deep, hot dish, arrange six heart-shaped croutons around and serve.
A brief poached-scallop dish finished with a reduced wine sauce. The one thing to change is the cooking time: five minutes at a boil will turn scallops rubbery.
- Cook the scallops far lessBring the wine and water to a bare simmer, add the scallops, and give them 1 to 2 minutes until just opaque at the centre. Lift them out with a slotted spoon and hold them warm while you build the sauce, rather than leaving them in the pan through the reduction.
- GillsIn American usage a gill is taken as 1/2 cup (4 fl oz), so half a gill of white wine is about 1/4 cup; the imperial gill is 5 fl oz. "Two light gills" is probably two gills poured a little short -- call it a scant cup of demi-glace.
- Demi-glaceClassic demi-glace is brown veal stock and espagnole reduced by half. Good commercial demi-glace concentrate works; failing that, reduce 2 cups of strong brown veal or beef stock to about 1 cup. Avoid gravy bases loaded with salt, since the sauce is reduced twice.
- "Reduce to a glaze"The poaching liquor should go down to a syrupy film that coats the pan bottom, a tablespoon or two at most. Watch it at the end; the sugars in the wine catch quickly once the water is gone.
- "Corner of the range"On a coal range the corner was the cool spot. Pull the pan off the heat entirely before whisking in the butter a small piece at a time, so the sauce emulsifies rather than breaking. It must not boil again after the butter goes in.
- ScallopsBuy dry-packed sea scallops if you can. Wet-packed scallops treated with phosphate release a great deal of water and will dilute your poaching liquor, which is the base of the whole sauce. Pull off the small tough side muscle before cooking.
- CroutonsSlices of firm white bread cut with a heart-shaped cutter and fried in clarified butter until crisp on both sides. Cut and fry them before you start the sauce, since the finished dish will not wait.
- YieldA pound and a half of scallops serves four as a main course, six as a first course.
The name points to Colbert, the family of preparations in nineteenth-century French cookery generally traced to Jean-Baptiste Colbert, Louis XIV's finance minister — most familiar in beurre Colbert, a maître d'hôtel butter enriched with meat glaze and tarragon, and in the split, crumbed sole Colbert. What survives here is the essential gesture: a fish or shellfish poached plainly, then dressed in a meat-based sauce sharpened with lemon and parsley and mounted with raw butter off the heat. Serving seafood in a veal-stock demi-glace looks odd now but was entirely ordinary in the professional kitchens this book draws on, where a single brown sauce is often said to have underpinned most of the menu. The heart-shaped croutons are an equally professional habit — hotel and restaurant cooks used them to edge a deep dish of anything sauced, as garnish and, it is usually suggested, as something to catch the sauce.