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December 21
Menu: Scallops; Broiled Squab Chickens; Braised Endive; Potatoes Anna; Chiffonade Salad; Apricot Custard; Coffee Scallops-For 1 pint of scallops take 2 tablespoons Crisco. Melt in frying pan, add scallops and 2 minced onions and 1 tablespoon flour with 1 pint liquor from scallops. Cook thoroughly, seasoning with salt and bit of paprika, then add 1/2 cup breadcrumbs and yolks of 4 eggs. Fill small shells with mixture and bake in quick oven, adding, if liked, little grated cheese.
A creamed scallop mixture baked in shells, of the sort served as a first course or luncheon dish. The measurements are generous with liquid and thin on thickener, so expect to adjust.
- The hinge: do not cook the scallops twiceScallops firm up in about two minutes and turn to rubber after that. Cook the onion, flour and liquor into a sauce first, then fold the scallops in at the end so their only real heat is the few minutes in the oven.
- A quick oven425-450F. The shells are only being browned and set, so eight to ten minutes is enough.
- A pint of scallopsBy volume, roughly 1 to 1 1/4 lb of shucked scallops. If using large sea scallops, halve or quarter them; bay scallops can go in whole.
- A pint of scallop liquorFresh scallops rarely give up anywhere near that much liquid today. Make up the difference with bottled clam juice or a light fish stock, and understand that 1 tablespoon flour will not thicken a full pint -- use 3 to 4 tablespoons, or reduce the liquid first.
- CriscoPlain vegetable shortening. Butter is the better choice here; butter and lard were the fats a dish like this would ordinarily have been made with, and the substitution is the reason the recipe exists.
- The egg yolksFour yolks enrich and bind, but add them off the heat, stirring in a little of the hot sauce first, or they will scramble in the pan.
- Small shellsCleaned scallop or large clam shells, sold as coquille shells; individual ramekins or a shallow gratin dish work identically. Set them on a sheet pan so they do not tip.
- YieldAbout four servings as a first course, two as a main dish with bread and a salad.
This comes from a Procter & Gamble Crisco cookbook, works whose real purpose was to persuade cooks that a new hydrogenated vegetable shortening could stand in for butter and lard in every dish they already made. Hence the odd shape of the instruction: the scallops, onion and egg yolks are conventional turn-of-the-century cookery, and only the first line is advertising. Baking shellfish in its own shell with sauce and crumbs is the coquille of French kitchens, which American hotel and household cooking is generally said to have absorbed in the late nineteenth century; the grated cheese offered here "if liked" is the step that turns it toward a gratin. The dated entries -- this one for December 22 -- reflect a period habit of planning meals by the calendar, and scallops were a cold-weather dish in the Atlantic states, sold shucked through the winter months.