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Clam Fritters
Strain one pint of clams, saving the juice; add to this juice sufficient water to make one pint; mix into it one egg, well beaten, and sufficient prepared flour to make a light batter, also the clams chopped and some salt. Drop by the spoonful into boiling hot lard.
A terse nineteenth-century formula that assumes you have shucked clams and their liquor in front of you. The measurements are by volume and the batter is meant to be loose.
- "Prepared flour"This is self-rising flour — flour already sifted with baking powder and a little salt. If you use plain flour, add about 1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder per cup and hold back on the added salt.
- A pint of clamsA pint of shucked clams is roughly a pound of meat; depending on size that is somewhere around three dozen littlenecks, or a couple of quarts in the shell. Canned chopped clams with their juice can be used in the same proportion.
- SaltClam liquor is already saline, so salt at the very end and taste the batter before frying.
- Batter consistencyThe recipe asks only for "a light batter," i.e. thick enough to drop from a spoon but not stiff. Something in the region of 1 1/2 to 2 cups of flour to the pint of liquid will get you there, but add it gradually rather than measuring.
- Frying temperature"Boiling hot lard" gives no reading; in modern terms fritters of this kind are usually fried around 365-375F. Too cool and they absorb fat; too hot and the outside colors before the center sets. Judge doneness by color rather than by the clock.
- Chopping the clamsChop, do not mince to paste. Coarse pieces stay tender; the clams cook through in the time the batter takes and further cooking makes them rubbery.
- Yield and servingThe quantity will make a couple of dozen small fritters, enough for about four. Drain on paper and serve immediately with lemon or a vinegar-based tartar sauce; they go soft within minutes.
Clam fritters belong to the Atlantic coast kitchen from Long Island up through New England, where clams were abundant, cheap and dug rather than bought — a food of shore towns before they were a restaurant item. The technique is the same one applied to corn, oysters and salt cod in the same era: a batter thin enough to hold the ingredient in suspension, dropped into deep fat, with the cooking liquid doing double duty as the liquid in the batter so nothing of the flavor is wasted. That the recipe calls for "prepared flour" suggests, though it does not prove, a date after the spread of commercial baking powder in the second half of the nineteenth century, when self-rising flours were sold under brand names and cookbook writers could assume a reader had a sack of one in the pantry; the term could equally describe flour mixed at home with soda and cream of tartar.