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Clam Stew
Take half peck hard-shell clams, wash shells clean, and put in a kettle with about one tea-cup water; let steam until the shells open, when take out of shell, strain juice, and return it with clams to the fire; after they come to a boil, add one pint milk, a piece of butter size of an egg, three crackers rolled fine, pepper, and salt if any is needed.-Mrs. A. W.
A plain milk stew of the oyster-stew family, and like oyster stew it is ruined by a minute too long on the heat. Everything else here is a matter of translating old measures.
- Half a peck of clamsA peck is 8 dry quarts, so this is 4 quarts of clams in the shell — several pounds of hard-shells, though the exact weight and count depend on their size.
- Butter the size of an eggAbout 2 oz, or 4 tablespoons. Nineteenth-century recipes often measured butter by eye against familiar objects such as an egg or a walnut.
- Three crackers rolled fineProbably a harder cracker than the modern soda cracker, though the book does not say which. Figure about a third of a cup of fine crumbs as a thickener; unsalted saltines or oyster crackers stand in, but they dissolve faster and salt the pot further.
- Strain the liquor properlyClam juice from steamed shells carries grit. Strain it through cheesecloth or a coffee filter, and leave the last spoonful in the bottom of the pan.
- The hinge: do not boil after the milk goes inClam meat toughens quickly with hard cooking, and milk may curdle if boiled with shellfish liquor. Bring the milk just to a steam, add the clams back at the last moment, and serve.
- Chop the meatThe recipe does not call for it, but hard-shell clams larger than a littleneck have a tough foot and adductor muscle; chop the meats coarsely before returning them, or the stew is a chewing exercise.
- Salt with careThe instruction "salt if any is needed" is the operative one. Clam liquor is already saline, and cracker crumbs add more. Taste at the end and often add nothing.
- YieldServes four as a first course, two or three as a supper with bread.
Buckeye Cookery (1877) was compiled in Marysville, Ohio, from recipes sent in by local women, which is why so many entries end in a set of initials rather than a name. A shell-fish chapter in a landlocked state owes much to the railroad and the ice car: by the 1870s oysters and, to a lesser extent, hard-shell clams were moving inland from the Atlantic packed in ice. The dish itself belongs to the milk-stew tradition — clams or oysters warmed in their own liquor, let down with milk, enriched with butter and thickened with broken crackers.