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Shellfish: Clams
Clams à la Newburg. 25 soft-shelled clams, 1 tablespoonful butter, 1 tablespoonful flour, Yolks 2 eggs, 1 cupful cream.
Put butter into a saucepan; stir until heated; add the flour, and cook until it thickens. Add the beaten yolks of the eggs with cream; beat well and pour over the clams; stir thoroughly until heated and cooked, but do not boil.
Clams (Boston style). 12 soft clams, pound salt pork.
Cut pork in pieces size of dice, and fry crisp. Add clams, freed from the tough part, and sauté them in the pork fat. Serve on Boston brown bread.
Clams in Vienna Rolls.
Take a large Vienna roll, cut out a piece of the crust the size of a half dollar, and remove the soft bread from the inside. Open as many littleneck clams as will fill the roll, replace the small piece of crust, and place in the oven for ten minutes.
Take the juice from the clams, make a thickening of flour and the juice, mix with it paprika, black pepper, Worcestershire Sauce, a dash McIlhenny's Tabasco Sauce, and heat. Remove the baked roll from the oven and pour sauce over it.
Escalloped Clams. 25 clams, MRS. CURTIS'S COOKBOOK 1 cupful cracker crumbs, ½ cupful milk, + cupful clam liquor, 2 eggs (well beaten), 1 tablespoonful melted butter, Salt and pepper.
Season the clams highly, mix with crumbs moistened with milk and clam liquor; add eggs and melted butter and the clams chopped. Fill each shell, sprinkle with bread crumbs, and brown. This fills twelve shells.
Four short clam preparations from the same page, all built on soft-shell or littleneck clams sold live in the shell. The controlling rule for all of them is heat discipline: clam muscle tightens and turns rubbery within a couple of minutes of cooking.
- Do not boil the NewburgThe sauce is thickened with egg yolk, which curdles above roughly 180F. Keep the pan below a simmer and pull it the moment it coats a spoon; a bowl set over hot water is the safest vessel if your burner runs hot.
- Soft-shell vs. littleneck"Soft clams" here are steamers (Mya arenaria), the long-necked New England clam, not a soft-shelled crab. Littlenecks are small hard-shell quahogs. Either can be substituted, but littlenecks are firmer and need even less cooking.
- The tough partOn a steamer this is the dark siphon sheath and the neck skin, which should be peeled off; the black-tipped neck itself is edible once skinned. The Boston-style recipe assumes you have done this before the clams meet the pork fat.
- Salt pork quantityThe amount of salt pork in the Boston-style recipe has not survived intact in this text. For twelve clams, roughly two ounces diced and rendered crisp gives enough fat without overwhelming them; bacon works if salt pork is unavailable.
- Clam liquor for the escalloped dishThe liquor measure is also incomplete. A quarter cup alongside the half cup of milk gives a mixture that moistens the crumbs without turning soupy; add it gradually, since crumb absorbency varies.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given for the escalloped clams or the Vienna rolls. Use a moderately hot oven, 400F, for both: about fifteen to twenty minutes for the filled shells until the tops brown, and the stated ten minutes for the rolls.
- Opening clams rawThe Vienna roll recipe wants clams shucked raw. If they resist, a few seconds in steam will relax the muscle enough to slip a knife in without cooking the meat. Discard any clam whose shell is cracked or that will not close when tapped.
- Tabasco and WorcestershireThe brand name in the original is the same product sold today. Both sauces are salty; taste the thickened clam juice before adding further salt.
- YieldThe escalloped clams fill twelve shells, as stated, and serve four as a first course. The Newburg from 25 clams and a cup of cream serves three or four; the recipe specifies no serving vehicle.
Newburg sauce -- butter, cream, egg yolk, usually sherry -- was a New York restaurant invention of the 1870s or 1880s, generally traced to Delmonico's and originally applied to lobster; by 1900 cookbooks were putting anything shellfish "a la Newburg," clams included, and this version has dropped the sherry entirely. The Boston-style clams, sauteed in salt pork fat and served on brown bread, belong to a much older and more local tradition, the same New England pairing of pork fat and shellfish that underlies clam chowder. The Vienna roll dish shows the other end of the period's cooking: a hollowed crusty roll used as an edible case, dressed with the then-novel bottled sauces that let a home cook approximate a chophouse flavor. Clams were cheap and abundant along the whole northeastern coast, which is why a general household manual could afford to print four ways of serving them on a single page.