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Baked Clams
Prepare twenty-five clams and drain.
Take one-half pint of cracker crumbs, one-half cup of warm milk, one-fourth cup of clam liquor, two beaten eggs, one heaping tablespoon of butter, and salt and pepper. Mix in one dish the crackers, and moisten first with the milk, then with clam liquor. Add the eggs and butter and the clams chopped fine.
Fill twelve clam shells heaping full, sprinkle each with bread crumbs and brown in the oven. -Mrs A. B. Brown.
A late-Victorian stuffed clam, close in spirit to what New England now calls stuffies. The original assumes you have shucked your own clams and kept the liquor, which is where most of the flavor lives.
- The clamsTwenty-five clams filling twelve shells suggests hard-shell quahogs or large cherrystones rather than small littlenecks. Shuck them raw over a bowl to catch the liquor, or steam them open briefly and use the strained steaming liquid; either way, chop the meat fine, as the recipe directs.
- Strain the liquorClam liquor almost always carries sand. Pour it through a coffee filter or a doubled square of cheesecloth before measuring out the quarter cup, or the whole dish will grit.
- Half a pint of cracker crumbsOne cup, measured as crumbs rather than whole crackers. A plain soda or common cracker is the likely sort here; a buttery modern snack cracker will make the stuffing greasy and sweet.
- Salt with careClam liquor and cracker crumbs are both salted already. Season at the end, after tasting the mixed stuffing, rather than adding salt at the start as the ingredient list implies.
- Oven temperatureNone is given; the recipe says only to 'brown in the oven.' A hot oven is the sensible modern equivalent: 400-425F for 15 to 20 minutes, until the tops are colored and the centers are set and hot through. The egg makes this a custard-bound stuffing, so it firms rather than dries.
- The shellsScrub the deep half-shells and boil them a few minutes before filling. Set them on a bed of coarse salt or crumpled foil in the pan so they sit level and do not tip their filling.
- YieldTwelve filled shells serve four as a first course, or three as a light supper with bread.
Stuffed and baked clams belong to the Atlantic shore tradition of stretching shellfish with a starch, and cracker crumbs were often used as a binder in nineteenth-century American kitchens. The hard-shell quahog, too tough to eat raw once it reaches chowder size, is exactly the clam this treatment suits: chopped fine, bound with egg and milk, and returned to its own shell for baking. Recipes of this shape appear across New England community cookbooks of the period, often as signed contributions from readers rather than a single house version. The instruction to fill twelve shells from twenty-five clams is a quiet indicator of household economy: two clams' worth of meat, plus crumbs, makes one generous portion.