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November 11
Menu: Baked Scallops in Shells; Chicken Souffle; Fried Celery; Latticed Potatoes; Watercress and Green Pepper Salad; Meringues Glaces; Coffee Baked Scallops in Shells-Take desired quantity of fresh scallops1 pint or 1 quart, and cook them in little white wine until done. Drain, cut in quarters, and add to them 1/2 their quantity of minced onion fried until tender, but not brown. Moisten with white sauce, season with red pepper and salt, heap high in scallop shells, cover with breadcrumbs moistened in melted Crisco, and brown in hot oven Garnish with lemon slices and parsley.
A compact 1913 version of what the French call coquilles Saint-Jacques. The recipe assumes you know how long a scallop takes, which is the one thing worth being explicit about.
- Do not cook the scallops "until done"Bay scallops need 60 to 90 seconds in simmering wine, sea scallops two to three minutes at most. They then get a second heat in the oven under the crumbs. Anything longer and they turn to erasers, which is the usual fate of this dish.
- "Hot oven"Read that as 425–450F. The filling is already cooked; the oven is only there to brown the crumb topping, so 8–10 minutes near the top of the oven is plenty. A broiler for two minutes does the same job.
- Quantities by volumeScallops were sold shucked by the pint or quart. A pint of shucked scallops is roughly 1 lb, a quart roughly 2 lb. The half-quantity of minced onion is by volume too, so a pint of scallops takes about a cup of minced onion — a generous amount by modern taste; half that is defensible.
- CriscoCrisco was new when this book was published and is still sold, though reformulated (no longer hydrogenated to the old degree). Melted butter in the crumbs browns better and tastes better here; the book specifies Crisco because it is an advertisement for Crisco.
- White sauceA basic béchamel: equal weights fat and flour cooked together, then milk whisked in. Use it thick rather than pourable, about 3/4 cup per pint of scallops, or the mixture will not "heap high." Better still, moisten it with some of the strained wine poaching liquid.
- Red pepperCayenne, not paprika and not a fresh chile. A scant pinch per serving; it is there for warmth behind the cream, not heat you can name.
- The shellsDeep scallop shells were sold as kitchen equipment then and still are; 6 oz ceramic ramekins or gratin dishes work identically. Scrub and boil real shells before first use.
- YieldA pint of scallops fills four shells as a first course, two as a light supper dish. Assemble ahead and refrigerate, then add five minutes to the oven time.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was written by Marion Harris Neil, cookery editor of the Ladies' Home Journal, for Procter & Gamble, who had introduced the hydrogenated cottonseed shortening two years earlier and needed to teach American cooks what to do with a fat that was neither butter nor lard. The "Calendar of Dinners" section supplied a menu for every day of the year, and the book routes dish after dish through the new product — hence Crisco in the buttered crumbs of a dish that has no other business containing it. The dish itself is the scalloped-shell preparation that English and American cookbooks had been printing for decades, the shell being both cooking vessel and plate; it is usually associated with French coquilles Saint-Jacques. The pilgrim's scallop shell of Saint James, from which the French name comes, is generally traced to the medieval shrine at Santiago de Compostela.