Home › Some Useful Recipes › Clam Soup (Wash four dozen clams open)
Clam Soup (Wash four dozen clams open)
Wash four dozen clams, open them and let them lie on the halfshell until the water has run out. Chop them fine with celery, mace and pepper, and an onion if you like it. Put the liquor and all in a saucepan and thicken with two tablespoonfuls of butter rolled in flour. Simmer twenty minutes and then stir in the beaten yolks of five eggs. Serve in a tureen with slice of toasted bread
A late-Victorian chowder-adjacent soup that relies entirely on clam liquor for its broth, thickened with beurre manié and enriched with egg yolks. Two things need attention: how long the clams cook, and how the yolks go in.
- The hinge: yolks off the heatOnce the beaten yolks go in, the pan must not return to a simmer or they will scramble into threads. Pull the pan off the burner, ladle a cup of the hot soup into the yolks while whisking, then stir that back in and let the residual heat thicken it.
- Twenty minutes is for the broth, not the clamsChopped clams are firm within two or three minutes and turn to rubber after that. Simmer the liquor, aromatics and thickening for the twenty minutes, then add the chopped clams at the very end, or accept a chewy result.
- Four dozen clamsRead this as hard-shell clams — littlenecks or cherrystones. That is several pounds in the shell (cherrystones a good deal more than littlenecks), yielding on the order of 2 cups of meat; the recipe gives no weight. Steaming them open briefly is easier than shucking raw and loses no liquor if you catch it in the pan.
- There is very little liquidThe liquor from four dozen clams, with butter, flour and five yolks, makes something closer to a thick saucelike soup than a broth. Other clam soups of the period do add water, light stock or scalded milk; this one calls for no added liquid at all.
- Strain the liquorClam liquor carries sand no matter how well the shells are washed. Let it settle and pour it off, or pass it through a fine sieve lined with cloth, before it goes near the flour.
- Butter rolled in flourThis is beurre manié: work 2 tablespoons soft butter with about 2 tablespoons flour into a paste and whisk it into the simmering liquor in small pieces. It thickens as it cooks out; a raw-flour taste means it needs a few more minutes before the yolks go in.
- MaceGround mace, the aril or outer covering of the nutmeg, was a common seasoning in shellfish soups of the period. A scant quarter teaspoon is enough for this quantity; more turns the soup perfumed. Nutmeg can stand in, used sparingly.
- Salt lastClam liquor is already saline and reduces further during the twenty-minute simmer. Taste before adding any salt at all.
- Yield and serviceFour to six as a first course. The toast is meant to be dry and crisp, laid in the bowl or passed at table rather than soaked in advance.
Clam soups thickened with egg yolk sit between two American traditions: the milk-and-pork chowders of New England and the older English practice of finishing fish broths with yolks and a blade of mace, which this version appears to echo. Hard clams were among the cheapest protein available on the Atlantic seaboard in the nineteenth century, dug on tidal flats and hawked by the bushel, and household books of the period often print clam soup, clam fritters, clam chowder and scalloped clams close together. The instruction to let the opened clams "lie on the halfshell until the water has run out" reflects a kitchen where shucking was done by hand over a bowl and every drop of liquor counted as stock. Serving in a tureen with toast, rather than crackers, might be taken to suggest the more formal of the two treatments — a soup for the table rather than a chowder for the family.