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CHAPTER XXXVI: Clam
1 teaspoonful pepper, Clam Soup. peck clams in shells, Salt to taste, 1/4 teaspoonful pepper, 1 teaspoonful cayenne pepper, 1 tablespoonful chopped onion, 1 tablespoonful chopped parsley, 1 tablespoonful butter, 2 tablespoonfuls flour, 2 cupfuls milk or cream.
Prepare the clams by boiling in the shells, and cutting as directed for clam chowder, keeping the soft part separate from the hard. Pour off 1 quart clam liquor after it settles, being careful not to take any of the sediment; put it on to boil, and remove the scum. Add 1 pint hot water, and season to taste with salt, pepper, cayenne, onion, and parsley. Put in the hard part of the clams.
Simmer fifteen minutes, strain, and SOUPS boil again, and when boiling thicken with flour cooked in the butter. Add the hot milk or cream and the soft part of the clams; serve at once.
A two-stage clam soup: the tough muscle flavours the broth and is then strained out, while the tender bellies go in at the very end. That split is the whole point of the method.
- The hingeThe soft parts go in with the hot milk and are served immediately, not simmered. Thirty seconds of residual heat is enough to warm them through; a few minutes of boiling turns them to rubber.
- A peck of clamsA peck is a dry measure of 8 quarts, a substantial quantity of clams in the shell, on the order of ten pounds. That should give the quart of strained liquor the recipe calls for, along with a generous amount of meat.
- Cutting as for chowderThe cross-reference means shucking the steamed clams and separating the firm adductor muscle and neck from the soft belly, then chopping the hard part fine.
- Letting the liquor settleClams carry grit, and the instruction not to disturb the sediment is doing real work. Let the liquor stand fifteen minutes and ladle rather than pour, or strain through a coffee filter.
- SaltSeason after the liquor has been strained rather than at the start. Clam liquor is already saline, and a quart of it plus a pint of water may need little or no added salt.
- Two teaspoons of pepperA teaspoon each of black pepper and cayenne is aggressive by current taste for a soup of this volume. Start with a quarter teaspoon of cayenne and adjust.
- ThickeningCook the flour in the butter two or three minutes without colouring, then whisk it into the boiling broth off the direct heat to avoid lumps. The milk should be hot when it goes in or the soup will taste raw and thin.
- Stray wordThe capitalised SOUPS mid-sentence is the printed page's running header, picked up in transcription. Ignore it.
- YieldRoughly six to eight cups, depending on how much is lost in simmering and straining.
Clam soup and clam chowder often appear near one another in American household books of the period, and the difference is largely the absence of potato and salt pork rather than any settled definition. The technique here — steaming the shells, saving the liquor, splitting hard muscle from soft belly — is a coastal kitchen habit, and the same hard/soft division was applied to both the hard-shell quahog and the soft-shell steamer, whose tough neck was likewise separated from the soft body. Measuring shellfish by the peck, a dry volume measure, suggests a time when clams were bought at the shore or from a cart by the basket rather than by the pound. Books of the Household Discoveries type collected such recipes alongside laundry hints and furniture polish, on the assumption that a housekeeper needed one reference volume for everything.