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Scallops in Curry
Plunge one and a half pounds well-cleaned fresh scallops in a quart of boiling water with a teaspoon salt and boil for two minutes. Drain thoroughly in a sieve and place them in the curry sauce, Cook the whole together for two minutes and serve in a hot, deep dish.
A two-line recipe that assumes you already have a pan of curry sauce standing by — the book expects you to turn back to its sauce chapter. Everything else here is about not overcooking the shellfish.
- The hinge: total cooking timeTwo minutes in salted water plus two minutes in the sauce is about all scallops will take before they turn springy and weep liquid. If your scallops are large sea scallops rather than small bay scallops, cut the blanch to 60-90 seconds, or skip the water entirely and finish them in the sauce alone.
- "Well-cleaned"This means pulling off the tough crescent of side muscle that clings to the white meat, and rinsing away any grit. Modern shucked scallops usually arrive trimmed, but check each one.
- Dry vs. wet scallopsScallops sold soaked in sodium tripolyphosphate release a great deal of milky water and season poorly. Look for "dry-packed" or diver scallops, which are ivory rather than bright white.
- The curry sauceThe book means its own recipe, from its sauce chapter; curry sauces of the period are generally roux-thickened and seasoned with curry powder, sometimes enriched with cream. Roughly 1 1/2 to 2 cups suits this quantity of scallops. A commercial curry sauce or a coconut-milk sauce works, though the result is no longer the 1906 dish.
- Bloom the powderCurry powder was commonly cooked into the roux rather than stirred in at the end, and that matters: raw curry powder added to a finished sauce tastes dusty. If your sauce was made without it, fry the powder in butter for 30 seconds before combining.
- SaltA teaspoon of salt per quart of blanching water is light seasoning, not brining; the scallops pick up very little. Season the sauce, not the water, if your sauce is already salted.
- Yield and servingOne and a half pounds serves four as a main course, six as a first course. The "hot, deep dish" was meant to keep the sauce from cooling; plain boiled rice is the obvious accompaniment, and the book of this period would likely have served it with a rice border.
Filippini's International Cook Book gathered dishes from across the restaurant repertoire of the early 1900s, and "curry" in that repertoire was generally a European convention rather than an Indian one: a flour-thickened cream or velouté sauce seasoned with commercial curry powder, sold ready-mixed by grocers on both sides of the Atlantic. Pairing it with scallops is a broadly Anglo-American move — curried shellfish, especially lobster, shrimp and scallop, turn up in hotel and club cooking of the era as a way of dressing up a mild, expensive ingredient. Recipes as bare as this one are a reminder that these books were written for cooks working through a chapter of foundation sauces, not for anyone starting from scratch.