Clam Soup
Boil half a peck of clams fifteen minutes; then take them from the shells, clean and wash them. Have ready the stewkettle; strain the water, in which clams have been boiled; chop up clams, and put in with three or four slices of salt pork, some mashed potatoes, salt and pepper to taste. Thicken with grated cracker, and add two spoonfuls butter rolled in flour. Let it boil twenty minutes and serve.--Mrs. C.
Clam Soup.
Open the clams and chop them up fine. To twenty clams, add: 1/2 gallon water. 3 good onions. 2 tablespoonfuls butter. A small bunch of parsley and thyme.
Just before taking off, add one quart rich milk and thicken with flour.--Mrs. D.
Two versions of the same dish from two contributors: a thick chowder-style soup bound with cracker, and a lighter milk-based one. Both need timing adjustments and both leave the yield unstated.
- Half a peck of clamsClams were sold by dry volume in the shell. Half a peck is 4 dry quarts; depending on the size of the clams that might be anywhere from about forty to sixty hard-shells, perhaps 5 or 6 lb of shellstock, yielding well under a pound of meat. Mrs. C. does not say how much liquid she uses, only the strained water the clams boiled in; Mrs. D's twenty clams to half a gallon is plainly the smaller, thinner soup.
- The fifteen-minute boilClams open within 5 to 7 minutes of steaming in an inch or two of water, and anything past that toughens the meat. Pull each one as it gapes, discard any that stay shut, and keep the liquor.
- GritThe instruction to "clean and wash" the meats matters more than it sounds. Rinse the shucked clams in a little of their own strained liquor rather than tap water, and let the cooking liquor settle so you can pour it off the sand at the bottom.
- Grated crackerThis means hard water crackers or ship biscuit grated to coarse crumbs, not sweet crackers. Unsalted saltines or oyster crackers crushed fine give the same effect; start with about half a cup and let it stand a few minutes before adding more, since it keeps swelling.
- Butter rolled in flourA kneaded butter-and-flour paste whisked in at the end. If the two spoonfuls are tablespoons, work in flour a little at a time until the butter takes up as much as it will hold and forms a stiff paste.
- Salt porkThree or four slices, thickness unstated; reckon on a few ounces. The recipe drops the slices straight into the kettle, though rendering them first and using the fat as a base is the usual modern handling. Taste before adding salt, as the pork and the clam liquor between them usually supply enough.
- The final twenty minutesBoiling chopped clams for another twenty minutes will make them rubbery. Simmer the potato, pork and cracker base until it has body, then add the clams for the last two or three minutes only.
- Mrs. D's milk'Rich milk' probably means something nearer half-and-half than modern whole milk. Once it goes in, hold the pot below a simmer; salt and hard boiling together will curdle dairy.
- YieldMrs. C. gives no liquid measure, so her yield cannot be calculated. Mrs. D's half gallon of water plus a quart of milk comes to something under 3 quarts after cooking.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1877), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by Virginia housewives, prints recipes as they were sent in, which is why two unrelated clam soups sit under one heading with only "Mrs. C." and "Mrs. D." to distinguish them. The first is essentially a chowder in the older sense, thickened with pounded ship biscuit in a tradition that goes back to shipboard and shore cookery on both sides of the Atlantic, while the second is a milk-enriched soup of a kind that ran alongside it rather than succeeding it. Virginia's tidewater counties supplied hard clams in quantity from the Chesapeake, and selling them by the peck in the shell was standard practice well into the twentieth century, which is why the measurement is a volume of shells rather than a weight of meat.