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Shellfish: Sauce
Dash McIlhenny's Tabasco Sauce, Quahog Cocktail (an individual service). 6 tiny quahogs, 1 tablespoonful clam liquor, Speck cayenne, 1 teaspoonful ground celery, 1 teaspoonful tomato catsup, 1 teaspoonful vinegar, Dash McIlhenny's Tabasco Sauce, 1 teaspoonful Worcestershire Sauce.
Put the quahogs in a glass with clam liquor, add cayenne, celery, tomato catsup, vinegar, Tabasco and Worcestershire Sauce. Stir thoroughly with fork.
Roast Clams.
Wash the clam shells thoroughly and drain in a colander. Spread them in a dripping pan and put in a hot oven. The shells will begin to open in five or eight minutes. Take from the oven, and, holding the shell over a warm dish, let the clam and juice drop out. Season with butter, salt, and pepper; serve very hot with thin slices of buttered brown bread.
Two clam preparations sharing a page: a raw quahog cocktail assembled in a glass, and clams roasted dry in their own shells. Both depend entirely on the clams being alive when you start.
- What a quahog isThe quahog (Mercenaria mercenaria) is the Atlantic hard-shell clam sold today by size: littleneck smallest, then topneck, cherrystone, and chowder clams largest. "Tiny quahogs" means littlenecks — six per glass is one serving.
- Raw shellfishThis cocktail is served raw. Buy from a dealer who can show the shellfish tag, keep the clams cold, and discard any that gape and will not close when tapped. Raw clams carry a Vibrio risk that no amount of catsup and vinegar reduces; they are not for anyone pregnant, immunocompromised, or with liver disease.
- "Ground celery"Genuinely ambiguous. It most likely means ground celery seed, in which case a teaspoonful is a great deal — start with a quarter of that and taste. If your jar is celery salt rather than seed, treat it as seasoning and hold back the salt elsewhere.
- Speck and dashA "speck" is what clings to the tip of a knife, well under an eighth of a teaspoon. A "dash" of Tabasco is two or three drops.
- McIlhenny's TabascoThe recipe names the maker specifically. The product is still built the same way — aged red pepper mash, vinegar, salt — so a current bottle should behave much the same.
- Clam liquorThe liquid released when clams are opened, not a bottled product. Open the clams over a bowl to catch it, and strain out grit through a fine sieve before it goes into the glass.
- A hot ovenRoughly 425-450F. Five to eight minutes is plausible for small clams at that heat; pull them the moment the shells crack open, as clams left in until every shell is wide open toughen.
- Brown breadThis may be Boston brown bread, the steamed rye, cornmeal and molasses loaf, dense and slightly sweet; 'brown bread' in books of this period can equally mean a plain whole-meal or graham loaf. Either way it is sliced thin and buttered, and a dark pumpernickel is the nearest substitute for the steamed loaf.
- YieldThe cocktail is written for one glass, so multiply as needed. For roast clams, figure eight to twelve littlenecks per person as a first course.
The clam cocktail belongs to the same turn-of-the-century fashion that produced the oyster cocktail and, a little later, the shrimp cocktail: raw shellfish dressed in a sharp red sauce of catsup, vinegar and hot pepper and served in a small stemmed glass at the start of a meal. Tomato catsup, Worcestershire and Tabasco were all widely sold commercial products by then, which is why a home cookery book could name them without explanation. Quahogs themselves were a New England and Mid-Atlantic mainstay long before that -- the name is from the Narragansett poquauhock, and the shells were the source of the purple beads used in wampum. Roasting clams dry in the shell is an oven version of the shore clambake; nothing is added but butter, and the clam's own liquor is caught rather than poured off.