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Shrimps, St. Jacques
(Trouville.) Shell 1 quart of boiled shrimps, chop them, and fry in 1 ounce of butter with an onion. Add 1 cup of milk, salt, pepper, parsley, and the yolk of 1 egg. Stir, but do not let it boil. Pour into buttered dishes or clam shells, cover with bread-crumbs and bake till brown. Serve with sliced lemon.
A gratin of shrimp in an egg-thickened milk sauce, baked in shells. It is quick, and the whole thing hinges on one instruction the original gives you plainly.
- Never let it boilThe sauce is bound with a raw egg yolk and nothing else. Above roughly 180F the yolk scrambles and the mixture turns grainy and weeping. Take the pan off the heat, stir the yolk in, and let residual warmth do the work.
- A quart of shrimpsThis is a volume of shrimp in the shell, not a weight of meat. Reckon about 1 1/2 lb of small shell-on shrimp, yielding roughly 3/4 lb picked, which is right for four shells.
- 1 ounce of butterTwo tablespoons. The onion should be finely chopped and cooked soft and pale before the shrimp go in.
- The sauce is looseA cup of milk with only an egg yolk to bind it gives a thin filling by modern taste. Simmer the milk down by a third before the yolk goes in, or stir a teaspoon of flour into the butter and onion first.
- Already-boiled shrimpThey need warming through, not frying. A minute in the butter is enough; longer and they tighten and go dry, and the oven stage will cook them again.
- Dishes or clam shellsScallop shells, ramekins or small gratin dishes, buttered. Set them on a sheet pan so they sit level and are easy to move.
- Bake till brownThe book gives no oven heat; a hot oven, in the region of 425F, for roughly 8 to 10 minutes, or two minutes under the broiler. The filling is already cooked, so you are only crisping the crumbs. Dot the crumbs with butter or they scorch dry.
- YieldFour shells as a first course, two as a light lunch with bread and the sliced lemon.
The name points to the shell: coquille Saint-Jacques is the French name for the scallop, and the scallop shell of St. James was carried by pilgrims returning from Santiago de Compostela and long used as a serving dish. Here the filling is shrimp rather than scallop, and the dish is baked in shells accordingly. The attribution to Trouville fits: the Normandy port was both a working fishing town and, by the later nineteenth century, a fashionable sea-bathing resort within easy reach of Paris.