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Clam Pie
Take three pints of either hard or soft-shell clams (if large, chop slightly), put in a sauce-pan and bring to a boil in their own liquor, or add a little water if needed; have ready four medium-sized potatoes, boiled till done and cut into small squares; make a nice piepaste with which line a medium-sized pudding-dish half way down the sides; turn a small tea-cup bottom up in middle of dish to keep up the top crust; put in first a layer of clams, and then a few potatoes, season with bits of butter and a little salt and pepper, and dredge with flour; add another layer of clams, and so on till dish is filled, adding juice of clams, and a little water if necessary (there should be about as much liquid as for chicken-pie). Cover with top-crust, cutting several slits for steam to escape, and bake three quarters of an hour. - Mrs. A. Wilson, Rye, N. Y.
A New England-style two-crust clam pie of the sort that turns up in nineteenth-century American cookbooks wherever shellfish was cheap. The instructions assume you know your own oven and your own clams, so a few numbers need filling in.
- Three pints of clamsThis means shucked clams with their liquor, not clams in the shell — roughly 3 lb of shucked meat, which may be anywhere from about four to seven dozen hard-shells depending on their size. Buying them already shucked from a fishmonger, with the liquor, saves considerable work.
- Hard or soft-shellHard-shells (quahogs) are chewier and want the slight chopping the recipe mentions; soft-shells (steamers) are tender but carry a dark siphon skin that is usually pulled off, and they hold grit. Either way, strain the liquor through a fine sieve or coffee filter before it goes into the pie.
- Do not cook the clams twiceThis is the hinge. "Bring to a boil in their own liquor" means just to the boil and off the heat — the clams then spend 45 minutes in the oven. Any real simmering at the first stage and they come out of the pie like erasers.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. For a filled two-crust pie of this kind, 400F for the first 20 minutes to set the pastry, then 375F for the remainder, is consistent with the three-quarters of an hour specified.
- The inverted teacupA small teacup or eggcup turned bottom-up in the centre holds the top crust clear of the filling and keeps it from going soggy — the same job a ceramic pie bird or funnel does. Any small ovenproof cup works; serve around it and lift it out at the table.
- Lining halfway down the sidesThe pastry lines only the upper part of the dish, so the top crust is sealed to a pastry rim rather than to the bare dish and there is no bottom crust under the wet filling. The recipe gives no reason for this, but it is a common enough arrangement in period pie instructions to look deliberate rather than a slip.
- "About as much liquid as for chicken-pie"Enough to come up level with the top layer of filling without floating it — roughly 1 1/2 to 2 cups for a medium pudding-dish. The flour dredged between layers is the only thickener, so expect a loose gravy rather than a set one.
- YieldA medium pudding-dish (about 2 to 2 1/2 quarts) of this feeds six generously as a main course.
Clam pie belongs to the coastal cooking of Long Island Sound and southern New England, and this version comes to Buckeye Cookery from Rye, New York, on the Westchester shore — a reminder that the book, compiled in Minnesota and Ohio, carried contributions from women well beyond those states. Shellfish was working food on that coast: quahogs could be raked from the flats in quantity, and a pie stretched them with potatoes and pastry into something that fed a table. The inverted teacup propping up the top crust is a thoroughly period detail, common in English and American pie recipes. Note too that the recipe treats "as much liquid as for chicken-pie" as self-evident — an assumption that every reader had made a chicken pie and needed no further explanation.