The Food Almanac, May 16

Eating Calendar
It is National Coquilles St. Jacques Day. It is named for St. James the Greater, one of the twelve Apostles and a fisherman. He's associated with scallops for some reason, and often depicted holding a scallop shell. Throughout Europe, scallops are named for James. So coquille St. Jacques are scallops, served in a thick cream sauce with leeks and fish stock. It once was a very popular dish in fancy, faux-French restaurants around the country, but we all got sick of the pasty sauces with the processed little scallops (Summing those were actually scallops.) I think the dish is due for a revival, but using dry-pack sea scallops, and mushrooms with a more pronounced flavor. A little Cognac, too. Here's my recipe:

8-12 medium sea scallops
Creole seasoning
1 stick butter, melted
1/2 cup white wine
1/4 cup flour
2 egg yolks
3 green onions, finely sliced
1/2 cup mushrooms, sliced into pieces about the size of a nickel
2 cups fish stock or oyster liquor
1/2 tsp. salt
1/2 Tsp. Tabasco
3 Tbs. grated Grana Padano or other parmesan cheese
3 Tbs. fresh bread crumbs

1. Slice the scallops crosswise. If they're very large, halve or quarter them from top to bottom as well. Sprinkle with Creole seasoning to your taste, and brush with some of the melted butter.

2. Sear the scallops in a heavy skillet for about a minute on each side. Remove and set aside.

3. Lower the heat to medium. Add the wine and bring it to a boil while whisking the pan to dissolve the browned bits from the scallops. Reduce the wine by half, then whisk in all but 1 Tbs. of the remaining butter. When it begins bubbling, whisk in the flour until blended completely. Add the egg yolks, the green onions and mushrooms, and cook until the onions are soft.

4. Stir in the fish stock or oyster liquor, salt, and Tabasco. Bring to a light boil. Add the scallops to the pan and cook until the sauce thickens.

5. Pour the pan contents into coquille shells or au gratin dishes. Top with a mixture of parmesan cheese and bread crumbs and a flake or two of the remaining butter. Bake on a pan in a preheated 350-degree oven until the top browns and the sauce bubbles. Serve hot, but with a warning about how hot it is.

Serves four.

Gourmet Gazetteer
Scallop Pond, New York is near the eastern fork of Long Island. It's a tidal pond connected through a series of bays to the Atlantic Ocean. It is surrounded by some large, scenic farms. It does indeed have a population of bay scallops–the sweet, little ones–in harvestable quantities. If you don't catch any, you can perhaps score some for dinner at the Wild Thyme Restaurant, a mile away in Southampton.

Annals Of Meat
Today is the birthday, in 1832, of Charles Philip Armour, the founder of the meat-packing company that bears his name. His breakthrough was using refrigeration and canning to keep meat fresh long enough that it could be sold in a widespread distribution system.

Wine And The Law
Today in 2005 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a state cannot prohibit the shipment of wine directly to a consumer from out of state, if the state allows wine shipments from within its borders. Louisiana was one of the states in which it was difficult to order wines by mail or on the Web; that has eased a good deal. The wholesalers and retailers are still fighting it, though. Personally, I think it's better to buy wines in a store, because they'll probably be cheaper than they are online, and you have the advantage of being able to talk to someone not connected to the winery. On the other hand, the great thing about mail-ordered wines is being able to get wines not distributed locally.

The Royal Menu
Today in 1770, the future French King Louis XVI married Marie Antoinette. She was fourteen; he was an older man, fifteen years old. Their time was the last gasp of the excesses of the ancien regime, and ended with the guillotine in the French Revolution. After that, the unemployed chefs of the aristocracy started opening restaurants in hotels, and the restaurant business began. But let's think some more about two people in their mid-teens being married.

Annals Of Popular Cuisine
Today in 1965, Spaghetti-O's were introduced to a waiting world. Canned pasta already in sauce. How hard is it to boil pasta? To make a fresh tomato sauce, even with canned tomatoes? For goodness sake, to open a jar of one of the many more-than-decent bottled pasta sauces out there? (Locally, we like Sal & Judy's) It's hard to imagine that anyone eats canned pasta except at the extremes of survival. We think we'd dig for edible roots first.

Edible Dictionary
chop suey, n., Chinese–The English transliteration of two Cantonese words that mean something like "this and that in little bits." It is widely believed that chop suey was invented by Chinese cooks in America for Americans, and is not a real Chinese dish. Stories differ on where and when; the two that most reek of plausibility are in San Francisco during the California Gold Rush, and during the building of the Central Pacific Railroad.

In fact, Chinese authorities note that dishes like this are prepared all around Canton. The Penguin Companion to Food even specifies a neighborhood: Toisan, in the countryside south of Canton. Authentically, there should be no exact recipe: the chef uses whatever he has at hand to produce a stir-fried dish with a little meat, a lot of vegetables, and sometimes (but not always) noodles. Despite all this authenticity, chop suey as made in Chinese restaurants now is a relic of the first wave of American Chinese restaurants, and is likely to be one of the worst dishes on the menu.

Deft Dining Rule #525
Ordering the following dishes marks you as not being seriously interested in Chinese food: chop suey, egg foo yung, fried rice, egg drop soup, and chow mein. Unless the restaurant is making some sort of ironic statement with those dishes, in which case at least one of them must be ordered.

Deft Dining Rule #526
Ordering lo mein in a Chinese restaurant is like ordering spaghetti and meatballs in an Italian restaurant, and bound by the same considerations.

Twice As Much For A Nickel
The five-cent coin that became known as the nickel was introduced today in 1866. It replaced the silver half-dime, which was irritatingly tiny. It's hard to imagine, but many people still alive (I am one of them) can remember a time when a nickel would actually buy the parts of a hamburger lunch. Those little square hamburgers made by a number of superannuated chains started out as a nickel, and I remember the Krystal selling them for that for a week in 1966. (They were regularly ten cents then.) An order of fries and a soft drink were each a nickel, too. If I ever become too wealthy for my wife and kids to spend it all, I will open a hamburger stand with nickel hamburgers. Everything else would be expensive, especially the T-shirts and caps.

The Saints
This is the feast day of St. Honorius of Amiens, France, who lived in the seventh century. He is one of the many patron saints of bakers and patissiers. Always depicted in full bishop's attire, he is shown carrying a paddle with bread on it.

Food Namesakes
Darrel Sweet, the drummer for the 1970s rock group Nazareth, got the Big Beat today in 1947. . . MSNBC Newsman Tucker Carlson went live today in 1969 ("tucker" is Australian slang for food).

Words To Eat By
"Good manners is the noise you don't make when you're eating soup."–Bennett Cerf.

Words To Drink By
"A man who doesn't drink is not, in my opinion, fully a man."–Anton Chekhov.

Copyright ©2011, Tom Fitzmorris.