Scallop Salad
Wash one pint of large scallops, drain, cover with boiling water, add one-half of a teaspoonful of salt and one teaspoonful of lemon juice, and simmer for fifteen minutes. Drain and drop into ice water until cold; then dry in a towel. Cut crosswise into thin slices, add to them an equal quantity of thinly sliced cucumbers, marinate them with a French dressing, to which has been added one scant teaspoonful of onion juice, and serve on lettuce leaves.
A straightforward composed salad whose one real flaw is the cooking time. Everything else translates directly.
- The fifteen-minute simmerThis is the hinge, and it is wrong by modern standards. Scallops are done when they turn from translucent to opaque, which takes two to three minutes in barely simmering water. Fifteen minutes will leave them rubbery.
- A pint of scallopsShellfish was sold by volume at the fish market; a pint is roughly a pound of shucked scallops. Ask for dry-packed sea scallops if you can — treated "wet" scallops leach liquid and dilute the dressing.
- Cutting crosswiseLarge sea scallops sliced across the grain into two or three coins is what the recipe means. Bay scallops are too small to slice and should be left whole.
- French dressingIn cookbooks of this period this means oil and vinegar with salt and pepper, whisked or shaken, commonly around three parts oil to one of vinegar — not the sweet orange bottled dressing that later took the name.
- Onion juiceGrate a peeled onion on the fine side of a box grater and press the pulp through a sieve, or squeeze a chunk in a garlic press. A scant teaspoon is assertive enough; more will bully the scallops.
- Drying mattersThe ice-water bath stops the cooking and firms the flesh, but wet scallops will not take a marinade. Blot them properly before slicing.
- CucumbersThe recipe does not say whether to peel; with English or Persian cucumbers, leave the skin on and salt the slices for ten minutes if you want them to stay crisp.
- YieldProbably three or four servings as a first course. Dress no more than half an hour before serving; the vinegar continues to firm the seafood.
Scallop salad belongs to the turn-of-the-century fashion for cold seafood dressed with oil and vinegar and served on a lettuce leaf — the same impulse that produced lobster, crab and shrimp salads in many American cookbooks of the 1890s and 1900s. Household books of the period leaned on such dishes because they could be made in the morning, held on ice, and brought out for luncheon without further cooking. The onion juice is a characteristic touch of the era: cooks wanted the flavor of onion without visible pieces, and 'onion juice' turns up frequently in the salad and sauce sections of books from these decades.