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Clam Fritters
25 clams. 2 eggs. 1 cup of milk. 1 teaspoonful of salt 2 dashes of black pepper 2 cupfuls of flour ½ teaspoonful of baking powder them with your fingers to Drain the clams and strip remove any pieces of shell that may have been left on them. Chop them fine. Beat the eggs all together until very light, add to them the milk, then the flour, pepper and salt, and beat until perfectly smooth; add the clams (free from all liquor), and the baking powder; mix well, and drop by spoonfuls in smoking hot oil or fat; when browned on one side, turn and brown on the other. When done, take out with a skimmer, as it makes them very heavy to pierce them with a fork.
The ingredient list has come down to us truncated — the clams, eggs and milk are all named in the method but their quantities were lost in the setting of the page. What survives is a workable batter formula and a sound frying technique.
- The missing quantitiesThe list gives only salt, pepper, 2 cupfuls of flour and 1½ teaspoonfuls of baking powder, yet the method calls for eggs, milk and clams. Any figures for those three are guesswork on the modern cook's part, not the book's; the printed page does not preserve them.
- Baking powder goes in lastThe method adds it after the clams rather than sifting it with the flour. Whatever the reason, leavening starts working the moment it is wet and a batter that sits loses its lift, so fry as soon as it is mixed.
- Free from all liquorThe instruction to drain the clams completely is the hinge. Clam liquor is thin and salty; any that goes in slackens the batter so the fritters spread and soak fat instead of puffing.
- Smoking hot oilThe book gives no temperature. In modern terms most fritters of this sort are fried somewhere in the 350-375F band: cooler and they absorb fat, much hotter and they colour before the centre sets. Period books commonly test with a cube of bread, which should brown in about a minute.
- Chop the clams fineClam muscle tightens in hot fat, and the recipe's instruction to chop them fine is what keeps them tender inside the fritter.
- Why not a forkPiercing a fritter lets the steam that holds the crumb open escape, and it collapses and reabsorbs oil. A slotted spoon or spider does the work without puncturing.
Clam fritters belong to the American coastal kitchen, where hard-shell clams were abundant and cheap. Their appearance in a book of hot weather dishes reflects a summer logic that has largely disappeared: shellfish were a seasonal, shore-season food, and a fritter could be turned out in minutes over a small fire without heating a range all afternoon. The batter itself is a standard late-nineteenth-century fritter formula — flour, milk, eggs and chemical leavening — of a type that became common as baking powder grew into a reliable commercial staple.