Clam Toast
2 doz. small clams 2 egg yolks 1/2 cup scalded milk 8 slices buttered toast 1/4 teaspoon salt Clean the clams and cut into small pieces; simmer a few minutes. Beat the egg yolks, add slowly to the scalded milk, combine with clams; add seasoning, pour over buttered toast on a hot platter.
A creamed-shellfish dish of the sort that filled the light-entrée slot on early twentieth-century menus. The written method leaves out the step that makes or breaks it: the yolk-and-milk mixture has to be cooked gently until it thickens.
- The hinge: cook the custard, do not boil itTemper the beaten yolks with the hot milk, return the mixture to low heat, and stir until it coats a spoon, around 170°F. Above about 180°F the yolks curdle and the sauce breaks into grains and whey.
- Scalded milkHeat to roughly 180°F, when the surface shivers and a ring of small bubbles forms at the edge of the pan. It should not reach a rolling boil.
- Two dozen small clamsLittlenecks or Manila clams. That is about a cup of shucked meat; canned whole baby clams, drained, can stand in if fresh are not available.
- Opening themSteam in a covered pan with a splash of water for 3 to 5 minutes, until they gape, then pull the meats. Strain and save the liquor; a tablespoon or two in the sauce is the best seasoning in the dish.
- "Simmer a few minutes" is too longShucked clam meat firms up in under two minutes and turns to rubber after that. If the clams have already been steamed open, chop them and add them to the finished sauce off the heat, just long enough to warm through.
- SeasoningA quarter teaspoon of salt is a starting point only; clam liquor is salty, so taste after combining. Pepper, a scrape of nutmeg or a few drops of lemon all suit the dish, and the recipe's bare instruction to 'add seasoning' leaves room for them.
- Yield and serviceEight slices of toast serve four as a lunch or supper course, or eight as a first course. Assemble and serve at once; the toast goes soft within a few minutes of being sauced.
The Gold Medal Flour Cook Book was promotional literature from the Washburn-Crosby milling company of Minneapolis, the firm that later became part of General Mills, and its recipes reflect standard American household cooking of the 1900s and 1910s rather than any regional tradition. Clam Toast belongs to a large family of period dishes — creamed oysters, creamed chicken, lobster Newburg, salmon on toast — in which a shellfish or scrap of meat is bound in a milk-and-yolk sauce and served over toast: the lighter made dish that came between fish and roast on a formal menu, or that stood alone at luncheon and Sunday supper. Cheap, abundant Atlantic clams, and the growing availability of canned clams in the later nineteenth century, put the dish within reach of kitchens far from any coast. Toast served the same purpose here that pastry cases and rice borders did elsewhere: it stretched a small quantity of expensive protein into a course.