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Fried Clams
Remove from shell large soft-shell clams; boat an egg well and add two table-spoons water; have the clams dried in a towel, and dip them first in the egg, then in finely-rolled cracker or bread crumbs, and fry (longer than oysters) in sweet lard or butter. Oysters may be prepared for cooking in same way. -Mrs. A. W.
A plain shallow-fry of whole steamer clams, of the sort still sold on the New England coast. The recipe is workable as written; most of what a modern cook needs is a translation of the vocabulary and a correction to the timing.
- "Boat an egg" is a misprintRead it as beat an egg. One egg with two tablespoons of water makes enough wash for about a pound of shucked clams.
- Soft-shell clamsThese are steamers (Mya arenaria), the long-necked clams with a shell that gapes and will not close. They are not the same as hard-shell quahogs or littlenecks, which do not fry well whole. Buy them live and heavy, discard any with cracked shells or a neck that does not flinch when touched.
- Shucking and cleaningThe book assumes you know the drill. Steam the clams open briefly or shuck them raw, then slip the tough black sheath off the neck and rinse the bellies to flush out sand. Sand is the usual failure in a fried clam, not seasoning.
- "Fry longer than oysters" — ignore this"Fry longer than oysters" — treat with caution -- Clam bellies are mostly water and will toughen into rubber if held in fat. Roughly two minutes in hot fat, until the crumb coat is a light brown, is enough; the instruction to fry them longer than oysters is easily overshot.
- Sweet lard"Sweet" here means fresh and unsalted, not sugared. Any neutral frying fat works; lard gives a crisp crust. The recipe does not specify how much fat to use, only that the clams are fried in it.
- Drying mattersWet clams shed their coating in the pan and spit violently in hot fat. The towel step is not optional; press them dry, then coat and fry at once rather than letting the crumbs go damp.
- CrumbsFinely-rolled cracker means dry crackers, such as soda or common crackers, rolled fine. Panko is too open; ordinary dry breadcrumbs are closer to the intent.
- Yield and servingA pound of shucked clams serves two as a main course, four as a starter. Salt them as they come out of the fat and serve immediately with lemon or a vinegar-based sauce; they lose their crispness within a few minutes.
Fried clams belong to the coastal kitchen rather than the Ohio one, which is part of what makes their appearance in Buckeye Cookery interesting: by the 1870s rail freight and packed shellfish had put oysters and clams on inland tables. Oysters take up far more space in the book than clams, and this recipe treats clams as a variation on oyster practice, closing with the note that oysters may be handled the same way. The whole-belly fried clam is generally associated with the Massachusetts North Shore, where it became a commercial roadside dish in the twentieth century; the technique here — egg wash, cracker crumb, hot fat — is the common nineteenth-century American crumbing method applied to whatever the market offered. The attribution to "Mrs. A. W." is typical of the book, which was assembled from contributions by women of Marysville, Ohio and credits them by initials.