Scallops and pea puree
From my new book 101 Dishes to Eat Before You Die
To be published August 2009 Love Food/Parragon Books
This is a rare and beautiful balance of textures and flavours. Pan-seared scallops have a wondrous, lightly caramelised crispness on the outside, a rude silky smoothness on the inside, and a bed of pea puree that’s clean, simple and pure. It’s a marriage made in heaven and it looks fantastic. Yet despite this, it’s absurdly easy to make, which makes it all the more extraordinary.
Whilst you shouldn’t be tempted to make this dish complicated, it would be criminal of me not to mention that you could add one extra element: a slice of fried black pudding underneath each scallop. Sounds weird, doesn’t it? Black pudding seems such a rough, boisterous ingredient. And yet something strange and magical happens when you marry it with the purity of the scallop – like Richard Gere and Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman, or Rex Harrison and Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady. Some matches were just meant to be.
Did you know that scallops can swim?
Yup, I’ve seen it with my own eyes. When you disturb them from the seabed they move with extraordinary speed (well, extraordinary for a bivalve!) by opening and closing their shells very fast to propel them up and away. They use their adductor muscle – the bit that we find so delicious – and because of this extraordinary ability, they are the only migratory bivalve.
I wondered if the scallop knew where it was going when it set off on it’s panickey swim, but it turns out that they have lots of complex little eyes with retinas around their rims – although they are always looking backwards whilst on the move. In fact, most bivalves can sense shadows falling across them, but few are as developed as the scallop. They are also hermaphrodites, but that’s a whole different story.
Serves four as a main course (a perfect size if you’ve served a starter course). By the way, the method of frying the scallops may sound a little odd, but trust me: it’s fantastic.
