After disappearing from the market for years, a special kind of seafood makes a triumphant comeback
It was around 1993 or 1994 at The Herbfarm (where Poppy/Lionhead chef Jerry Traunfeld was then in the kitchen) when food writer Sara Dickerman found The Birth of Venus in her seafood chowder. As Dickerman remembers it, she was picking shellfish out of a “super elegant” tarragon broth when “there was this beautiful scallop shell just looking like the Botticelli painting.”
The Venus on the half-shell was actually a pink scallop, Dickerman’s first, and it immediately became a symbol of Seattle for her. In fact, the tiny bivalves—a dollop of meat no bigger than a quarter sits in a pastel-colored shell about three inches across—with their endemic harvest, striking appearance and variegated flavor, had become a symbol of Puget Sound’s singular seafood scene…