Marlene Parrish - What Einstein Told His Cook 2

The very large so-called diver scallops (10 or fewer per pound) have supposedly been hand-harvested by scuba divers rather than dredged from the sea bottom. Because of their impressive size, relative scarcity, and consequent high price, you’ll find them only at expensive restaurants. But don’t swallow the scuba story hook, line, and sinker. There’s nothing to prevent a restaurant from calling any large scallop a diver, if it so chooses.

Using their big adductor muscles, scallops in the wild can clap their shells together forcefully, shooting themselves through the water by jet propulsion to escape a predatory fish or starfish. (It’s a jungle down there.) They can even aim their spurts of water to propel themselves in almost any direction, although most often “forward” by jetting water straight out the hinge end.

You think that’s wild? Wait’ll you hear this. Many scallops have blue eyes. No kidding. They’re the only bivalves that have eyes at all, much less baby blues. If you peek in between the shells of a scallop, you’ll see two rows of fifty or more tiny eye dots, staring back at you from the critter’s front edge, or mantle. While a scallop can’t exactly read the bottom line on an eye chart, it can distinguish changes in light intensity, and that’s a good enough warning that it’s time to scoot away from any stranger that darkens its door.

One of my most exciting experiences (I know: You’ll think I need to get a life) was wading among live scallops in the shallows off Cape Cod and watching each one jet away the instant my shadow fell upon him and her. (Note to editor: That’s him and her, not him or her; most scallops are hermaphrodites.) In Europe, the female red roe is saved and served along with the adductor muscle, covered with a cream sauce, topped with browned bread crumbs, and called coquilles St. Jacques .

Scallop muscles have a tendency to dry out and lose weight, decreasing their per-pound value in the marketplace. So wholesalers, and even the fishing boat crews themselves during a long trip, may soak them in fresh water or in a solution of sodium tripolyphosphate (STP) to keep them hydrated. Because scallop meat is naturally saturated with salty seawater, osmosis will force water into it from the less salty soaking liquid. The STP helps the scallop to retain that water. Soaked scallop meats are called “wet” or processed scallops to distinguish them from unsoaked or “dry” scallops.

Processed scallops that have been loaded with water will be excessively heavy and should rightfully be sold at a lower price per pound. (Consumers, take note.) Processed or “wet” scallops will be almost pure white (the phosphate acts also as a bleach) rather than their natural ivory, creamy, or pinkish color, and they will be resting in a milky, sticky liquid that makes them tend to clump together. They’re a disaster to sauté, because they’ll release their excess water into the pan and steam instead of browning.

The role of the FDA? It monitors the water content of scallop products. Back home in the sea, scallops are 75 percent to 80 percent water. If a commercial product contains more than 80 percent water, the FDA requires that it be labeled an “ x % Water-Added Scallop Product” and, if applicable, “Processed with Sodium Tripolyphosphate.” Scallops containing more than 84 percent water may not be sold at all. So much for that “The FDA made me do it” cop-out.

The problem is that these FDA-mandated labels are affixed to the wholesale buckets and you may never see them in the retail market. So buy your scallops only from a fishmonger whom you trust not to sell wet scallops at dry-scallop prices. Why pay $7 to $14 a pound, depending on size and season, for water?

CRUSTACEAN CAMOUFLAGE

When I buy raw shrimp, sometimes they’re gray and sometimes they’re pink, almost as if they’d been cooked. Are the pink ones somehow less fresh?

No, they’re just different species. Some are pinker and some are grayer, even when they’re still gamboling about on the ocean floor. But all of their shells turn bright pink when cooked. That color is in the shells all along, but it is masked by darker colors that break down when heated.

At least in the case of domestic Atlantic shrimp, the shallow-water ones are more or less sand-colored for maximum camouflage against the sandy bottom. In deep water, where the prevailing light has a bluish cast, they can afford to be pink, because reddish pigments don’t reflect much blue light and therefore don’t show up.

Unless you live near the shrimp-boat docks, all the shrimp that you buy were almost certainly frozen fresh from the boat or even when still on the boat, and shipped to market in that condition. At the market, they thaw out batches of shrimp to put in the display case. Like a lot of other seafood, however, shrimp begins to spoil quickly after being thawed. Fortunately, you carry with you at all times an exquisitely sensitive instrument for detecting spoilage: your nose. Any odor at all, other than that of a fresh ocean breeze, is your cue to buy something else for dinner. So don’t be afraid to ask to smell a sample of the shrimp up close before you make your purchase.

(Once, I almost got my head handed to me by an indignant fishmonger on the waterfront in Marseilles when I picked up a squid and sniffed it. I hadn’t realized that I was dealing with the fisherman himself, straight off the boat. How much fresher could it be?)

SHRIMP SHRIMP

What does the “scampi” mean in “shrimp scampi”?

It sounds like a way of preparing shrimp, and in a way it is. But in a way it isn’t.

Scampi is the Italian name for a species of large prawns known also as Dublin Bay prawns. And what is a prawn? Strictly speaking, it’s a crustacean more closely related to a lobster than to a shrimp. But the name depends on where you live.

There are literally millions of species of animals in the sea, including twenty-six thousand known varieties of crustaceans. A lot of these critters look pretty much alike, and the same species may be known by many different names around the world. What we call a shrimp over here may be called a prawn over there. And it often is. Or vice versa. Or maybe not. (I hope that’s clear.)

In Europe and most other parts of the world, a prawn is a specific variety of large (up to 9 inches long) crustacean with long antennae and skinny, lobster-like front claws. It is not a shrimp because shrimp have no claws. Instead, prawns are very similar to what we call crayfish or crawfish in the United States (or, in Louisiana, “mud bugs”). The prawns from Ireland’s Dublin Bay are reputedly top o’ the heap, begorrah !

On a French menu, the word crevette can go either way: as a crevette rose , it’s a prawn, while as a crevette grise , it’s a small, brown shrimp. (Yes, grise means gray in French; go figure.) Except, of course, when the chef calls a prawn a langoustine , which he or she may do whenever he or she feels like it. Prawns probably became langoustines in France when Spanish prawns, or langostinos , crossed the Pyrenees. (Not by themselves.)

In our freewheeling United States, alas, any large shrimp might be called a prawn, depending on how hard the chef wants to impress you. If the shrimp are not at least “jumbo” in size (around 20 or fewer to the pound), however, it’s particularly stretching to refer to them as prawns. The only thing you can be pretty sure of is that the critters in “shrimp scampi” on most American menus aren’t either scampi or prawns; they’re whatever plain old shrimp the restaurant has at hand.