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Scallops, Stewed

Stewed scallops cooked in butter and flour sauce, seasoned with lemon or vinegar, salt, and pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Scallops, Stewed

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderately hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the scallops

  1. Open the scallops' shells and remove the scallops, trimming away the beards and black parts.

  2. Wash the scallops in 2 or 3 waters.

Cook and thicken

  1. Cover the scallops with warm water and boil gently for 50 to 60 minutes.

  2. Knead the flour and butter together, mixing in a little salt and pepper.

  3. Separate the mixture into small pieces.

  4. Add the flour and butter mixture to the stewpan 20 minutes before serving.

Season and serve

  1. When ready, place the scallops on a hot dish.

  2. Season the sauce to taste.

  3. Add lemon juice or vinegar.

  4. Pour over the scallops.

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. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  4. Flour + lemontop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30,404 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

Butter and flour 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
Form the main body of the dish, becoming tender as they simmer gently in the liquid.
Butter
Combined with flour, it enriches the sauce and gives it a smooth, rich mouthfeel.
Flour
Kneaded with butter and dropped into the liquid, it thickens the sauce.
Lemon juice or vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the rich, thickened sauce.

The step that matters

Adding the flour and butter mixture. Flour thickens only when heated in liquid long enough to swell its starch. Adding it 20 minutes before serving gives time to cook out the raw flour taste and reach a smooth sauce, while pieces dropped in all at once may clump.

“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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