{"id":879,"date":"2010-12-23T11:28:11","date_gmt":"2010-12-23T16:28:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jameschatto.com\/?p=879"},"modified":"2012-05-01T10:19:29","modified_gmt":"2012-05-01T15:19:29","slug":"879","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/jameschatto.com\/?p=879","title":{"rendered":"Totally Scallops"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Totally Scallops by Judy Eberspaecher<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Obsession is absorbing. It can go on for years \u2013 even decades \u2013 a process of concentrated gathering, collecting, hoarding. Then one day a point of satiety is reached and the tide turns. All that the river drew in on its flood is finally allowed to ebb back out into the sea. And when an obsession is shared a strange transformation sometimes takes place as all those stored experiences reveal themselves as expertise.<\/p>\n

Totally Scallops<\/em> (Kimagic publishing), is a specialized cookbook entirely devoted to scallop recipes. It is the pearl cultivated over Judy Eberspaecher\u2019s 26-year fascination with Pectinidae, the world\u2019s only migratory bivalves. Judy hails from Nova Scotia, Eastern Canada\u2019s scallop hub, so she comes by her passion naturally. She\u2019s a wonderful photographer, and her book is lavishly illustrated with her own images of scallop dishes, boats, regions, markets, fishers, environments\u2026 anything that is related to the delectable little critters. And there are almost 100 short, lucid, eminently doable recipes collected from around the world. It\u2019s fascinating to see how different cultures have treated the scallop, how they choose to enhance that rich treat.<\/p>\n

In England, we grew up prizing the scallop\u2019s livid, glossy orange roe, tucked around the creamy white cylinder of the adductor muscle. In North America, only the muscle is prized and typically, on a scallop boat, the \u201croes and rims\u201d are scraped away as detritus and tossed back into the sea. Patrick McMurray of Starfish, Toronto\u2019s primo raw bar, brings in real East Coast scallops alive-oh and encourages his customers to eat everything inside the shell, including the roe and the ring of crunchy eyes that lies just inside the shell\u2019s rim. It is SO delicious, SO sweet and strange and textured that you forget you are eating a living creature.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 McMurray has his moment in the book, but it\u2019s really about ways of cooking scallops. \u201cTreat them like miniature tenderloins,\u201d proposes English chef Theo Randall of the Intercontinental hotel in London. \u201cThey have such a great texture and flavour that they don\u2019t need much help.\u201d Fortunately, the rest of the world disagrees. From Montreal comes a scallop, canteloupe and foie gras tartare; from Wales a scallop and laverbread kiss; from Japan, curried scallop cakes; mango scallops fom Singapore, scallop carpaccio and Norwegian scallop and avocado tarts\u2026 And scallop soups from just about everywhere. Judy\u2019s husband, wine writer Alex Eberspaecher, provides an introduction and a short essay on matching scallops to wine (Champagne or Riesling share the honours). Best of all are the informative little sidebars that together amount to a small treatise on scallop science and lore.<\/p>\n

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King scallops with ginger-lime butter<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The book just won the Best Fish and Seafood (Canada) category from the Gourmand World Cookbook Awards and now goes up against the rest of the world. The winners will be announced in March. This is a marvellous book for scallop lovers but it will resonate more generally than that, ringing a bell with anyone who still jealously hugs an obsession or has learned to share it. Buy a copy at the Cookbook Store (of course) or from the book\u2019s own web site, www.totallyscallops.com<\/a> ($39.95).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u00a0 Obsession is absorbing. It can go on for years \u2013 even decades \u2013 a process of concentrated gathering, collecting, hoarding. Then one day a point of satiety is reached and the tide turns. All that the river drew in on its flood is finally allowed to ebb back out into the sea. And when […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[102],"tags":[266,265],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/jameschatto.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/879"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/jameschatto.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/jameschatto.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jameschatto.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jameschatto.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=879"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/jameschatto.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/879\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2062,"href":"http:\/\/jameschatto.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/879\/revisions\/2062"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/jameschatto.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=879"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jameschatto.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=879"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jameschatto.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=879"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}