Clam Soup
Wash clams, and place in just sufficient water for the soup, let boil, and as soon as they clear from shells, take out and place clams in a jar for pickling; throw into the broth a pint each of sweet milk and rolled crackers, add a little salt, boil five minutes, and just before taking from the fire, add one ounce butter beaten with two eggs. Serve, and let each person season to taste.
A thin, brothy chowder in the older New England manner, thickened with cracker crumbs and finished with an egg-and-butter liaison. The recipe assumes you already have live clams and a pickling jar waiting, and it gives almost no quantities, so read it as a method rather than a formula.
- The hinge: do not boil after the eggs go inOne ounce of butter beaten with two eggs is a liaison, not a binder. Once it is stirred into the hot soup the pan must come off the heat immediately; a return to the boil curdles the eggs into threads and the soup turns grainy.
- Quantities are missingNo number of clams is given. For a pint of milk and a pint of crumbs, figure about 3 to 4 dozen hard-shell clams (roughly 4-5 lb in the shell), which yields four to six servings of a light first-course soup.
- "Just sufficient water"The clams open in their own liquor plus a small amount of added water; use no more than the soup needs, since it has no stock behind it and too much water leaves the broth weak.
- Purge the sand firstBeyond scrubbing the shells, let the clams sit in cold salted water for 20-30 minutes so they expel grit, then lift them out rather than pouring. Strain the cooking broth through a fine sieve or cloth; sand at the bottom of the pot will otherwise end up in the bowl.
- Rolled crackersSoda or water crackers crushed with a rolling pin — the period's all-purpose thickener. A pint of crumbs is 2 cups, though the weight varies a good deal with how finely they are rolled; unsalted saltines are the nearest modern equivalent. Add gradually, as cracker brands swell at different rates.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh unsoured milk, as distinct from buttermilk or sour milk. Whole milk is what is meant.
- The clams leave the soupThe instruction to set the cooked clams aside "in a jar for pickling" means this is a broth soup, with the meats saved for a second dish. If you want clams in the bowl, chop and hold them off the heat, then return them at the very end — a few minutes of boiling makes them tough.
- SeasoningSalt is the only seasoning called for, the rest being left to the table. Modern taste usually wants white pepper, and a little cream in place of some of the milk if you prefer a richer body.
Buckeye Cookery was compiled in Ohio in 1877, well inland, and its clam soup shows what a coastal dish looked like once it had traveled: no salt pork, no potatoes, no onion, just clam liquor, milk, crackers and an egg finish. Cracker-thickened clam and fish soups are often said to have been common along the New England coast before roux or flour became usual, and rolled crackers were among the thickeners a nineteenth-century pantry could depend on — shelf-stable, cheap, and requiring no cooking out. The direction to pickle the boiled clams is equally of its period: pickled clams and oysters were a common way to hold shellfish for days without ice, and the household economy of the book takes for granted that nothing edible leaves the kitchen unused. However the clams reached an Ohio kitchen, the recipe reflects a time when a pint of milk was the surest ingredient in the pot.