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Creamed Scallops

A dish of scallops simmered in a milk and flour sauce, seasoned with salt and pepper, served on toast.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Creamed Scallops

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Scald the scallops in their own liquor or oyster liquor for 2 minutes after boiling.

  2. Heat the milk in a saucepan.

Make the sauce

  1. Mix the flour with the butter until smooth, then add to the milk to thicken.

  2. Drain the scallops and add them to the sauce.

  3. Season with salt and pepper to taste.

Serve

  1. Serve the scallops on squares of toast.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Scallop + buttertop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together160 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  5. Flour + peppertop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together50,459 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Scallops
Provide the main protein and delicate sweet flavor of the dish.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the cream sauce, giving it body and richness.
Flour
Thickens the milk into a smooth sauce as it heats.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, and helps the flour blend smoothly into the sauce.

The step that matters

Mix the flour with the butter until smooth, then add to the milk. Mixing flour with fat first coats the starch granules so they disperse evenly instead of clumping when they meet hot milk. Lumps form if the flour goes in dry or unblended, leaving a grainy sauce.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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