Home › The Principles of Cookery › Clam Soup
Clam Soup
Wash as many clams as may be required, and put them into a saucepan with just sufficient boiling water to keep them from burning. Boil them for a few minutes, and when the shells open and the juice runs out, take the clams from the shells and chop them small. Strain the liquor, and stir into it the chopped clams, season it with pepper, and thicken it with a little butter rolled in flour, and let it boil a quarter of an hour. Put little pieces of toasted bread in the tureen before pouring the soup into it. The flavour of the soup may be varied by the addition of onions or celery, or a little milk may be added, or the yolks of well-beaten eggs. Soup may be made in the same way from whelks and cockles. Time, half an hour. Sufficient, a quart of soup for three persons.
A plain New England-style clam broth thickened with beurre manié. The recipe's one real fault by modern standards is the long boil, which is easily worked around.
- Add the clams lastBoiling chopped clams for a quarter of an hour turns them to rubber. Simmer the strained liquor with the thickening for those fifteen minutes to cook out the raw flour, then stir the chopped clams in off the heat and give them a minute or two to warm through.
- QuantityNo amount is given. For the quart the recipe yields, allow about 3 dozen hard-shell clams (roughly 3-4 lb in the shell), which gives a generous cup of chopped meat plus their liquor.
- GritThe book assumes clams straight from the beach. Scrub the shells and let them stand an hour in cold salted water so they spit out sand, and discard any that stay open when tapped.
- Strain properly"Strain the liquor" means through muslin or a coffee filter, not a colander. Clam liquor carries fine sand that will otherwise sit in the bottom of the tureen. Leave the last spoonful behind.
- SaltNo salt is called for; only pepper. Clam liquor is already saline, so taste before adding any.
- Butter rolled in flourThis is beurre manié, worked to a paste with the fingers. For a quart, about 1 tbsp butter to 1 tbsp flour gives a lightly bound broth; whisk it in in small pieces so it disperses.
- The egg yolk finishIf you take the yolk variation, beat the yolks with a ladle of hot soup first and stir the mixture back in off the heat. Yolks added directly to boiling soup will curdle into threads. Add the milk off the boil as well.
- Whelks and cocklesCockles work exactly as written and are still sold in Britain and Ireland. Whelks need far longer cooking than clams and are tough unless simmered until tender before chopping.
- ServingA quart for three, as stated, is a first-course portion. Toast the bread dry and hard, or it disintegrates the moment the soup hits it.
The hard-shell clam of the New England and mid-Atlantic coasts had no direct equivalent in the English kitchen, where the cockle and the whelk filled the same place in cheap shellfish cookery. Those two are the substitutes the reader is pointed toward, and the method is essentially the one used for a cockle broth: cook the shellfish open, keep the liquor as the stock, thicken lightly, and pour the whole over toast in the tureen. The instruction to use only "sufficient boiling water to keep them from burning" belongs to the older shellfish cookery, in which the liquor released from the shells carried much of the dish's flavour.