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Fried Clams
For this use small sand clams. Drain them in a colander, Do and dry one by one, on an old napkin or soft linen. not lift them with a fork, but carefully with the fingers. Season on both sides with salt and cayenne. Beat up an egg in a saucer, add one tablespoonful of boiling water and half a teaspoonful of salt. Put some nice stale bread crumbs out on your baking board, and season with salt and cayenne. Dip the clams one by one, first in the bread crumbs, then in the egg, and then place again in the crumbs, covering every part most carefully, and pressing it lightly with the hand. Put a deep frying pan over the fire, with enough oil or lard to immerse the clams. Be sure the oil or lard is smoking hot (365° Fahr.); if you have no thermometer, drop in a crumb of bread, if it browns quickly, it is hot enough. Put in six clams, watch them carefully, as soon as they are of a golden brown, take them out with a skimmer, and drain on a soft piece of brown paper, and serve at once on a hot dish. Some kind of pickles should always be served with them, in a separate dish.
Clams are very much better fried in oil than lard or butter. They should never be fried until you are quite ready to eat them, as they are not good when kept warm, or warmed over. If you have a large quantity to fry, they may be dipped an hour or two before serving time, and spread on a clean cloth in a cool place. Always use bread crumbs in preference to cracker crumbs. 25 clams 2 eggs 1 cup of milk
A clean, precise deep-frying method that needs very little updating — the original even gives a thermometer reading. Most of the work is in the breading and the timing.
- Frying temperature365°F is stated outright and is still the right figure. Use a thermometer and fry in small batches of six or so, as instructed, or the temperature crashes and the coating soaks.
- What a "sand clam" isMost likely the soft-shell clam, Mya arenaria, sold today as a steamer or Ipswich clam, though "sand clam" was never a fixed name. Buy them shucked, whole with bellies, or use shucked small hard-shell clams. Freshly shucked and drained is what the recipe assumes.
- The breading orderCrumbs, then egg, then crumbs again — not the usual flour-egg-crumb. The first dusting of dry crumbs gives the wet clam something for the egg to cling to. Press the coating on lightly and let the clams rest before frying so it sets.
- The egg washOne egg beaten with a tablespoon of boiling water and half a teaspoon of salt. The hot water thins the egg so it coats rather than gums; add it slowly while beating so the egg does not scramble.
- The trailing ingredient list"25 clams, 2 eggs, 1 cup of milk" is the book's summary line, but milk appears nowhere in the method. Either ignore it or use it to thin the egg wash instead of the boiling water — the instructions as written do not need it.
- Cook timeWhole shucked clams need roughly one to two minutes at 365°F, until the crumbs are golden. They are done well before the coating is dark; longer and the bellies toughen.
- DrainingModern printing inks and recycled paper make brown paper a poor choice. Drain on a wire rack over a tray, which also keeps the underside crisp better than paper ever did.
- Serving and yieldTwenty-five clams serves two or three as a course. The warning is worth taking seriously: fried clams collapse within minutes of coming out of the fat, so fry only when everyone is seated. Pickles or tartare on the side.
- FatThe preference for oil over lard holds. Use a neutral oil with a high smoke point — peanut, canola or a refined vegetable oil — and enough depth to float the clams free of the pan bottom.
Fried clams belong to the New England shore-dinner tradition, where soft-shell clams dug from tidal flats were shucked, breaded and dropped into hot fat as one of the quickest ways to feed a crowd near the water. The name "sand clam" here points to Mya arenaria, the long-necked steamer whose thin shell and sandy habitat distinguish it from the hard quahog; the fried version is conventionally credited to Essex, Massachusetts, and to Woodman's in 1916, though the book predates that in any case. A book called Hot Weather Dishes makes room for shellfish because summer was the season of coastal cottages and clambakes. The insistence on frying to order, on bread rather than cracker crumbs, and on oil rather than lard reads as a cook correcting habits she saw around her.