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Clams
Boil the long clams, and the small round clams (with their shells on) in water enough to prevent their burning; they will boil in about five minutes; then turn into a colander; save the liquor; pour as much of the clear liquor in a stewpan as needed; put the clams from the shells into the stewpan with the clear liquor, adding little pepper; place on the fire, and as soon as boiling hot, add butter and flour braided together; let it come to a boil, and serve on sippets of toast.
A plain New England clam stew, built on the clams' own liquor rather than milk. The whole dish turns on the liquor being clean and the clams being pulled off the heat the moment they open.
- Purge and scrub firstThe recipe says nothing about cleaning, but soft-shells in particular hold sand. Give them an hour or two in the refrigerator in cold water, discard any that stay open when tapped, and scrub the shells before they go in the pot.
- "The clear liquor"The recipe drains the clams through a colander and then asks for only the clear part of the saved liquor. Let it stand a few minutes and pour off the top, leaving the gritty sediment behind, or run it through a coffee filter or muslin. Any sand left in the liquor ends up in the bowl.
- Long clams and round clamsLong clams are soft-shells, sold now as steamers or Ipswich clams; the small round ones are littleneck or cherrystone quahogs. Soft-shells carry a black sheath on the siphon that is usually peeled off before eating.
- Five minutes is a maximumCook only until the shells gape, which can be three to five minutes for littlenecks and a little longer for soft-shells. Clams held at a boil after that tighten into rubber, and reheating them in the liquor at the end is where most of the damage gets done. Add them back off the boil and warm through.
- "Butter and flour braided together"Beurre manie: butter and flour worked to a smooth paste, conventionally in equal parts by weight, whisked in bit by bit. The recipe gives no quantities; about a tablespoon of each to a quart of liquor is a reasonable starting point, and it thickens as it comes to a simmer, so judge it after a minute rather than adding more at once.
- SaltNone is called for and none is usually wanted. Clam liquor is already saline; taste before you reach for the salt cellar.
- SippetsSmall triangles or fingers of toasted bread, arranged in the bowl with the stew poured over. Dry toast holds up better than buttered under hot liquid.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantities. As a rough guide, something on the order of four dozen littlenecks or three to four pounds of soft-shells, yielding about a quart of strained liquor, would serve four as a first course.
Clam stews and chowders of this kind belong to the coastal kitchens of New England, where soft-shell clams dug from tidal flats and quahogs raked from harbour bottoms were among the cheapest protein available and the shells piled up in middens long before European settlement. What distinguishes this version from the milk-based clam chowder that dominated later cookbooks is its restraint: nothing but clam liquor, pepper, butter and flour, a treatment close to the oyster stews that often sit in the same chapter of nineteenth-century household books. The instruction to save and clarify the liquor is the mark of a cook who has eaten sandy clams, and the butter-and-flour paste is what a French kitchen would call beurre manie, though the recipe does not use the term.