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Deviled Clams
1 tablespoonful of chopped parsley 1 tablespoonful of butter Yolks of two eggs 2 tablespoonfuls of flour Salt and cayenne to taste Drain the clams and chop them middling fine and drain again. Put the milk on to boil. Rub the butter and flour together and stir into the milk when boiling; as soon as it thickens, take it from the fire and add all the other ingredients. Beat the yolks before adding them. Have the shells of the clams washed perfectly clean, fill them with this mixture, sprinkle lightly with bread crumbs, put them in a baking pan and brown in a quick oven for five minutes. Serve in the shells; garnish with parsley.
They may be cooked in silver scallop shells, but are much better done in their own shells, as there is a flavor imparted by the heated shell which greatly enriches the mixture. A word of caution: avoid long cooking, as it (38) makes them dry. If your oven will not brown them in five or six minutes, fire shovel red hot. and you have no salamander, heat your Take the shells from the oven, hold the shovel over them until they brown.
A late-Victorian hot-weather supper dish: chopped clams bound in a thick white sauce, returned to their shells and browned. The whole point is speed at the oven stage.
- Missing quantitiesThe ingredient list as printed begins mid-way and gives no amount for the clams or the milk. The proportions of butter and flour (1 tablespoon to 2) point to a very stiff binding sauce; about 1 cup of milk to roughly 2 cups of chopped clams and their liquor will give a mixture that mounds in the shell rather than running out.
- Quick ovenA "quick oven" is usually reckoned at somewhere around 400-450F. Preheat fully and set the pan high, since the whole browning is meant to happen in five minutes.
- The hinge: do not overbakeThe clams are chopped small and go into an already-cooked sauce, so the oven is only browning the crumbs. Longer baking squeezes the water out of the clam and leaves the filling dry and grainy, which is exactly what the original warns against.
- Salamander substituteThe red-hot fire shovel held over the shells was the period workaround for a slow oven. A modern broiler on high, with the pan four inches below the element for a minute or two, does the same job.
- Drain twice, and keep the liquorDraining before and after chopping matters: clam liquor released later will thin the sauce and it will weep in the shell. Save the drained liquor and use a spoonful or two to season the sauce instead of discarding it.
- Tempering the yolksThe yolks go in off the heat with everything else. Beat them first, as directed, and stir in a little of the hot sauce before combining, or they will set into threads.
- The shellsUse the deeper half-shells, scrubbed and boiled briefly. Set them on a bed of coarse salt or crumpled foil in the pan so they sit level. The original credits the heated shell with enriching the mixture; that may be no more than the trace of clam liquor baked into it.
- YieldThe original gives no yield. On the quantities suggested above, the filling would fill roughly a dozen hard-clam shells, enough for four as a first course.
Deviled clams belong to a family of American shellfish dishes -- deviled crab, scalloped oysters, clams casino later on -- built on the same idea of chopping the shellfish, binding it with a flour-thickened sauce and serving it back in its own shell. "Deviled" in nineteenth-century American cookery generally meant sharply seasoned rather than any particular technique, and here the heat comes only from cayenne. The recipe also refers to a salamander -- an iron plate on a handle heated in the fire and held over food to glaze it -- and offers a red-hot fire shovel as a substitute.