Home › Oysters and Shellfish › Baked Soft Clams
Baked Soft Clams
Place 1 dozen large soft clams in bakingpan, so that the juices will be retained in the lower shell. Bake until clam opens, remove the upper shell carefully, and place on each clam a slice of crisp bacon. Serve in lower shell.
A three-line recipe that assumes you already know your oven and your clams. The two things it leaves out are the temperature and the fact that soft-shell clams hold grit.
- What a soft clam is"Soft clam" means the soft-shell clam, Mya arenaria — the steamer or longneck, with a thin brittle shell and a protruding siphon that will not retract fully. It is not a quahog or littleneck, which have hard shells that sit flat and are better suited to broiling on the half shell.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. A hot oven, in the region of 450F, is the usual modern reading; the shells will gape in a few minutes, sooner or later depending on size, so watch them rather than trust a clock.
- Purge the sandSoft-shell clams live buried in mud and hold grit inside the body, and the recipe says nothing about it. Soak them in cold salted water — half an hour at least, longer if you can — lift them out rather than pouring, and scrub the shells before they go in the pan.
- Setting them in the panRest each clam with the deeper cup down and level, wedging them against one another so no juice tips out. A bed of coarse salt or crumpled foil in the pan keeps them upright.
- The baconCook the bacon separately to crisp and drain it, as written — a raw slice laid on will not render in the minute or two the clam needs, and it will slick the liquor with fat.
- Do not hold them in the ovenPull each clam as it opens. Soft clam meat is tender and turns to rubber with even a few extra minutes of heat. Discard any that stays shut.
- Trimming before servingThe tough black sheath on the siphon can be slipped off after baking; it is edible but leathery. This recipe does not mention it.
- YieldA dozen is one generous first course for two, or a single plate for one. Serve with lemon and the liquor still in the shell.
Soft-shell clams were the cheap shellfish of the northeastern American coast, dug from tidal flats at low water by anyone with a rake and a bucket, and they belong to the steamed-and-melted-butter tradition of the New England clambake rather than to the more formal half-shell service given to oysters. Compilations of this period often gave clams the treatments usually reserved for oysters — baked on the shell, escalloped, fried, in fritters — which appears to be what has happened here: pairing bacon with a baked bivalve is the same idea as the oyster-and-bacon dish already current by this date under the name angels on horseback, though there the oyster is wrapped in the bacon rather than topped with it. The bacon is doing two jobs, seasoning a mild bivalve and adding fat to a dish that otherwise has none, and the instruction to serve in the lower shell keeps the shell liquor, which the recipe is plainly at pains not to lose.