There might not be anything as beautiful as a perfectly seared scallop: pale, pearlescent meat surrounded by a brown-gold and crisp corona.
You can drape this scallop in a bright green herbed sauce or wrap in it pork.
You can try to show it up with a fresh-fruit salsa or mask its mild sweetness with a citrus vinaigrette.
But you have to do it justice.
"No matter how you prepare it," said Cindy Wolf, owner and chef of Baltimore's Charleston restaurant, "the scallop should be the center of the plate and the center of the dish."
The scallop is getting plenty of attention these days.
Because of its decidedly unfishy taste and smell, the scallop is increasingly popular among restaurant goers who are not overly fond of fish.
And that same mildness gives chefs a blank canvas on which to create.
"They are growing in popularity because restaurants are serving better scallops," said Patrick Morrow, chef at Ryleigh's Oyster Bar in Federal Hill.
Morrow indulges his imagination by preparing his signature scallop trio differently every few weeks.
"Right now, it's pork," he said. The scallops are wrapped in bacon, stuffed with andouille sausage and topped with braised pork belly.
"You get cravings, I get cravings. Right now, I crave pork."
If scallops present endless possibilities for the professional chef, they present two significant challenges for the home cook: choosing them and cooking them.
And the second challenge - cooking scallops without overcooking them until they develop the rubbery texture of an eraser - can be made more difficult if you choose your scallops poorly.
"With scallops, there isn't much to worry about except quality," said Bill Watkins, the consumer safety officer for the Food and Drug Administration's division of seafood safety.
"The trend now is for dry scallops, ones that are harvested and flash-frozen on the boat.
"But the scallop industry for as long as I have worked for the FDA is notorious for adding weight by soaking them in sodium tripolyphosphate [STP]."
(Scallops no longer can close their shells when they are harvested and the muscle that is the meat of the scallop quickly dries out. STP keeps them moist).
"You cook these things and the water comes out and you end up poaching them. And they just shrivel down.
"There's no harm, other than the customer pays more. In my opinion, that's economic fraud, but almost everybody does it."
