Home › The World's Kitchen › Scallops, Wilson
Scallops, Wilson
Place one and a half pounds very fresh scallops in a bowl and squeeze in juice of a sound lemon. Add a tablespoon oil, half teaspoon freshly chopped parsley, level teaspoon salt and half teaspoon pepper, repeatedly turn scallops in seasoning and let infuse thirty minutes. Mix on a plate one and a half ounces grated cooked ham, one and a half tablespoons grated Parmesan cheese, a teaspoon chopped chives and four tablespoons fresh bread crumbs. Dip scallops in beaten egg, then carefully roll them in this mixture, place in a frying basket and fry in boiling fat for six minutes. Lift up, drain well, sprinkle a little salt over, dress on hot dish with a folded napkin, decorate with fried parsley and serve.
A straightforward deep-fried scallop, but the frying time is the thing to fix before anything else.
- Six minutes is far too longSea scallops are cooked through in about 90 seconds to 2 minutes in hot fat, by which point the crumb coating is golden. Six minutes gives you a rubber eraser in a dark crust.
- "Boiling fat"Fat does not boil; the phrase means fat hot enough to bubble vigorously when food enters, roughly 350-375F. Below that the crumbs soak; much above it the ham and Parmesan in the coating scorch.
- Scallop sizeA pound and a half of large sea scallops is 20-25 pieces. If you use small bay scallops the coating will outweigh them and the frying time drops to under a minute, so sea scallops are the better match here.
- The lemon marinadeThirty minutes in lemon juice firms the surface slightly. Do not extend it much beyond that or the exteriors turn opaque and chalky before they ever meet the fat.
- Grated cooked hamMeans a firm piece of cooked ham grated on a box grater, not deli slices. A piece of unsliced boiled ham chilled hard will grate; thin soft slices will simply smear.
- Pat them dryLift the scallops from the marinade and blot them before the egg wash. Residual lemon juice and oil thin the egg and the coating slides off in the fryer.
- Fried parsleyWhole dry sprigs dropped into the hot fat for a few seconds until they stop sputtering, then drained. Any water on the leaves makes the fat spit hard, so dry them thoroughly.
- The napkinPeriod service called for a folded linen napkin on the platter to absorb fat and keep fried food crisp. A rack or a paper-lined dish does the same job if you would rather not launder it.
- YieldServes four as a first course, two or three as a main with a sharp salad.
Dishes catalogued under a surname - Scallops Wilson and the like - are common in the large turn-of-the-century recipe compendia, where a single ingredient may carry many preparations distinguished only by garnish or coating. Such names are often taken to commemorate a patron or a colleague of the chef rather than anything about the dish itself, though in most cases the person behind the name cannot now be identified. What the recipe does record is a standard approach to a mild shellfish: acidulate it, coat it in a savoury crumb carrying ham and Parmesan, and send it out on a napkin with fried parsley, a common flourish for fried dishes of the period.