Home › Shell Fish › Stewed Clams
Stewed Clams
Put twenty-five clams into a hot pan and stew five minutes, then add two tablespoonfuls of butter, dust them with a tablespoonful of flour, add six whole pepper-corns and stew gently for ten minutes. Then add a half-cupful of cream and the well beaten yolks of two eggs. Take from the fire and season with pepper and salt.
A short, rich clam stew of the sort that turns up constantly in turn-of-the-century American cookery. Two things need attention: the clam count is by volume rather than weight, and the cooking time will destroy the clams if taken literally.
- The hinge: total cooking timeFifteen minutes of stewing turns clams into erasers. Shucked clams need one to two minutes in their own liquor, and should be lifted out while the sauce is built and returned only at the end to warm through.
- What "twenty-five clams" meansProbably hard-shell clams — quahogs or littlenecks — shucked, with their liquor kept; the recipe does not say which kind, and it assumes you have opened them yourself. Twenty-five littlenecks yield roughly a cup of meats and about as much liquor. Shucked clams, around 1 lb with their juice, would be near the equivalent.
- "Put into a hot pan and stew"Nothing is added, so the clams are meant to release their own liquor and cook in it. Use a wide pan over moderate heat and keep the liquid; it is the whole flavour base of the dish.
- Butter and flourA tablespoonful of flour dusted over two of butter is a loose roux made in the pan. Let it cook a minute before the liquid goes in or the sauce will taste pasty.
- PeppercornsSix whole peppercorns are for infusion, not for eating. Fish them out before serving, or tie them in a scrap of muslin.
- The egg yolksBeaten yolks added to a boiling sauce will scramble. Whisk a ladle of the hot cream sauce into the yolks first, then return the mixture to the pan off the heat and stir until it thickens — it should not go back over a flame.
- CreamA half-cupful of cream; heavy cream works. Period "cream" was not standardised and could be thinner than today's heavy cream, so half-and-half is also plausible. The yolks share the thickening with the tablespoonful of flour.
- Yield and servingServes perhaps two as a light main course, or three or four as a first course. Stews of this kind were often spooned over dry toast or into pastry shells, though the recipe itself says nothing about how to serve it.
Clams were among the cheapest protein on the American Atlantic coast, dug at low tide or sold from carts, and a stew like this stretched a small quantity with cream and egg yolks into something that read as rich. The liaison of beaten yolks finished off the heat comes from the French repertoire that was influential in American cookbook writing of the period, applied to a thoroughly local shellfish; the same technique appears in the oyster stews found in the shellfish chapters of many books of the time.