French Scallops with Normande Sauce (Coquilles Saint Jacques à la Normande)

This rustic seafood fish from Northern France exhibits the real taste of Normandy: seafood, dairy and the odd splash of booze.

‘Coquilles Saint Jacques’ is the French term for scallops, rather than the name of a specific dish. A few decades ago a particular scallop dish did the rounds under the same name, denoting a mixture of scallops and prawns cooked in a scallop shell with a cream sauce and piped mashed potatoes. This also happens to be my mother’s famous dish - she lived on the Isle of Jersey for 20 years and really got the taste for Normandy scallops! However, in Normandy there are many ways of cooking and serving Coquilles Saint Jacques, and not many people will pipe mashed potatoes on them. That version that was once so popular was actually a take on ‘à la Normande’ - ‘Norman style’. This style combines scallops with a sauce Normande, a white sauce flavoured with shallot, mushrooms and a nip of calvados/brandy, dry cider or white wine. A seafood essence is traditionally added too - ‘jus de moules’ - which is the cooking liquor left over from cooking mussels, but for this I recommend using a splash of Thai fish sauce. Although made with anchovies, Thai fish sauce actually embodies the exact same savoury, oceanic-umami that makes this sauce phenomenal. Combined with the umami potential of mushrooms, this sauce is really quite explosive with flavour. Feel free to deploy it on any freshly-cooked seafood of your choosing. Let’s go!