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Scallops, Lyonnaise
Plunge a pound and a half fresh scallops in a quart boiling water with a teaspoon salt, boil for five minutes and drain on sieve. Heat two tablespoons melted butter in a saucepan, add two medium, exceedingly fine sliced onions and cook to a nice light colour, stirring well meanwhile, then add one tablespoon flour, stir well and cook for five minutes more, stirring once in a while. Pour in two tablespoons sherry and one and half gills demi-glace, mix well and let boil for five minutes. Add the scallops with three saltspoons salt, one saltspoon cayenne pepper, mix a little, cook for six minutes, occasionally mixing, pour scallops into a deep dish, sprinkle a little chopped parsley over and serve.
A straightforward onion-and-brown-sauce treatment from the era when "lyonnaise" on a menu simply meant onions. The one thing to change is the cooking time for the shellfish.
- The scallops are cooked twice as long as they needFive minutes of boiling followed by six minutes in the sauce will give you rubber. Sea scallops need roughly 2 minutes in simmering liquid, or a hard sear of about 90 seconds a side; bay scallops need less. Poach briefly, or skip the blanching entirely and slip the raw scallops into the finished sauce for the last two minutes off a low heat.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. Three saltspoons of salt is 3/4 teaspoon, and one saltspoon of cayenne is a full 1/4 teaspoon — assertive, and worth halving unless the demi-glace is bland.
- GillA gill is half a cup, so one and a half gills of demi-glace is 3/4 cup.
- Demi-glaceClassically brown veal stock reduced with espagnole, the sort of sauce base a large kitchen would have had ready. Jarred or frozen demi-glace concentrate works; failing that, reduce 1 1/2 cups good brown stock by half and thicken lightly. Do not use a cube — the salt will collide with the 3/4 teaspoon called for.
- "Two tablespoons melted butter"Measure it solid, then melt. Two tablespoons plus one of flour makes a thin roux, which is correct here — the demi-glace carries most of the body.
- The onions"Exceedingly fine sliced" and cooked to a light colour, not caramelised. Take eight to ten minutes over moderate heat; browning them hard sweetens the dish away from what it is meant to be.
- DeveiningModern scallops arrive shucked, but pull off the small tough side-muscle if it is still attached. Buy dry-packed if you can — treated "wet" scallops leach liquid and will thin the sauce.
- YieldA pound and a half of scallops serves four as a main course with rice or boiled potatoes, six as a first course.
À la lyonnaise means, in nearly every case, with onions — Lyon's reputation for them is old enough that the shorthand needed no explanation to a professional cook. What is striking is finding it applied to scallops at all: the classic lyonnaise garnish belongs to potatoes, tripe, liver and eggs, and the technique here is really a brown-sauce ragoût with shellfish substituted for the usual meat. The saltspoon measurements and the assumption that demi-glace is simply on hand both place this squarely in the professional tradition, translated for domestic readers with mixed success — the home cook of 1900 was no likelier than today's to have three-quarters of a cup of veal reduction waiting.