Lucky dip part two - fancy and simple with scallops

"a dish that [Richard] Olney recalls was all the rage in Parisian restaurants during the postwar period. It has subsequently fallen from favour, possibly because the complexity of the dish falls foul of the modern mania for allowing raw ingredients to shine." Felicity Cloake

The page that I picked for my lucky dip has two recipes for scallops on it - or Coquilles St. Jacques if you prefer to stick to the French. Now I am never going to make either of these because David just won't eat shellfish. I have eaten them a couple of times but to be honest I do not remember their taste very clearly, so perhaps not my favourite shellfish.

And isn't that a rather perfect picture? - the yellows, oranges and deep browns of the cutlery, the crockery, the dish and the wine all blend together so perfectly. And it's also slightly old-fashioned in style, though I do notice that that colour of cutlery is coming back in. And as we discovered some time ago, gold is actually the best thing to make cutlery out of because it is inert and has no taste. If only we could afford it.

St. Jacques is the French for St. James, and these particular shellfish - a kind of clam, mostly from the North East coast of France (well for the French Coquilles St. Jacques anyway) - are called after him because the pilgrims on the road to the sanctuary of St. James in Santiago de Compostella took them with them to honour him. St James is associated with them because:

"The scallop shell is the emblem of Saint James the Greater. The saint’s association with the scallop shell is based on a legend that he once rescued a knight covered in scallops; a variation on the tale is that, while his remains were being transported to Spain from Jerusalem, the horse of a knight fell into the water and emerged covered in scallop shells." The Nibble

So much for the scallops themselves. On to the dishes from my Time-Life book.

The first is Coquilles St. Jacques à la Parisienne. The closest version I can find is from Salt and Leisure and it purports to be Julia Child's version but it differs slightly from the one in my book in that the poaching liquid is a bit more complex in mine - the ingredients in mine are: 3/4 pint chicken stock, 3/4 pint dry white wine, 3 sliced shallots or spring onions, 3 celery tops with leaves, cut in 2 inch pieces, 4 parsley sprigs, 1 bay leaf, 10 whole peppercorns. The rest of the recipe is much the same.

The main dispute about this dish though appears to be whether it has mashed, or rather duchesse potatoes with it or not. I found a few recipes with, and there does indeed seem to be some kind of agreement that this is part of it. Which makes it sound more like a fancy restaurant dish in the manner of the 60s and 70s than the dish in my book, which has no mashed potatoes. Felicity Cloake describes it:

"As Hopkinson and Bareham note: “Many jokes have been made at the expense of this charming way with scallops, pointed directly at its ruff of piped mashed potato around the edge of the shell. Why this should be so, when one considers that most of us are fond of a nice fish pie, is a mystery. After all, this fluffy crusted border helps to hold in the sauce surrounding the scallop meat, adds a pleasing texture and, for heaven’s sake, it pretties the dish.

The mystery to me is why critics pick on the mash as the fussy bit, when the scallop sits on a mushroom and shallot duxelles, enrobed in a béchamel made with the milk it was poached in, covered in breadcrumbs, and then – and only then – sealed with potato.

I suspect their former ubiquity was at least partly down to the ease with which one could short-change the diner on the scallop front. With all that going on, the poor creature gets quite lost amid the clamour of glossy mushroom and buttery béchamel – it could be anything under there, from crabsticks to tofu."

Suffice to say there are no potatoes either in my book or in the 'Julia Child' version I refer to above. No breadcrumbs either. My mum used to make duchesse potatoes - though hers were cheesy. Loved them. But then I will eat potatoes just about any way you can imagine.

The second recipe is for Coquilles St. Jacques à la Provençale, which sounds somewhat simpler and which is found rather more often in cook books. Well these days everyone loves anything Provençale don't they? So does it have tomatoes, black olives, etc.? No just garlic and parsley. In my version anyway. Interestingly, when I looked for pictures of this dish almost all had tomatoes in them in some way. It was only when I searched for scallops in garlic butter that the picture at left was found. I think this is what 'my' recipe would look like. Julia Child simply coats the scallops in seasoned flour, fries them until golden brown and then pours over heated clarified butter laced with garlic, sprinkling over parsley to finish. Couldn't be simpler. And here is Elizabeth David's version of the same recipe just to confirm that, yes, it is that simple.

COQUILLES ST JACQUES A LA PROVENCALE

The scallops that come from the Mediterranean are very much smaller than those from the Atlantic, but this method of cooking them can be applied just as well to the large variety. Slice the cleaned white part of the scallops into two rounds, season them with salt, pepper and lemon juice; immediately before cooking them, sprinkle them very lightly with flour, fry them pale golden on each side in a mixture of butter and olive oil. Put in the red parts, add a generous sprinkling of finely chopped garlic and parsley and shake the pan so that the mixture spreads evenly amongst the scallops. Five minutes cooking altogether will be enough.

Now how quick and easy is tha? Julia Child didn't slice hers and she squeezed lemon over them at the end.

But as I say, easy though it is I won't be cooking this any time soon. You could give it a go though.