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Clam Cocktail
2 tablespoons Worcestershire sauce 2 tablespoons vinegar 3 tablespoons lemon juice 1 tablespoon tomato catsup 1 tablespoon horseradish 1 teaspoon salt few grains cayenne few drops tabasco Place clams in shallow dish after removing the black parts. Mix other ingredients. Pour over clams, and let stand for several hours. Serve ice cold in small glasses, as a first course.
The clams may be mixed with the sauce and served in halves of grapefruit, in lemon shells, or tomato cups. Set on a bed of ice.
A cocktail sauce with no clam quantity given — the original assumes you know that a first course means a small glassful per person. Everything else here is a matter of handling raw shellfish sensibly.
- The missing ingredientNo number of clams is stated. The sauce as written is enough to dress roughly a pint of shucked small clams, which serves four to six in cocktail glasses, but the original genuinely leaves this open.
- Which clamsFreshly shucked littlenecks or cherrystones, bought from a source that can show you the shellfish tag. Clams already sitting in a tub of liquor are the wrong starting point for a dish that is never heated.
- "The black parts"This means the dark stomach mass and the tip of the siphon, which carry grit and are unpleasant in a raw preparation. Pinch them off with your fingers or trim with scissors.
- Acid is not a kill stepThe vinegar and lemon juice firm the surface of the clam but do not make raw shellfish safe. Anyone pregnant, immunocompromised, or with liver disease should skip raw clams entirely.
- Where "several hours" happensIn a 1907 kitchen this meant a cold larder or the ice chest. Keep the dish covered in the refrigerator, and do not let it sit out on the counter.
- Shorten the marinadeHalf an hour is plenty. Left for hours, the acid works through the whole clam and the texture turns tight and chalky, much like over-marinated ceviche.
- Seasoning to tasteTwo tablespoons of Worcestershire against one of catsup makes a thin, sharp, brown sauce rather than the thick red cocktail sauce most people now expect. Add catsup if you want body, but taste before you commit.
- ServingGrapefruit halves, hollowed lemons and tomato cups were the fashionable containers of the period. A chilled coupe on a bed of crushed ice does the same work with less carving.
Clam and oyster cocktails belong to the American restaurant fashion of the 1880s through the 1920s, when the word "cocktail" was borrowed from the bar and applied to any cold, sharply seasoned little thing served at the start of a meal — hence the small glass, the ice bed, and the fruit-shell containers. The origin of the shellfish version is usually traced, on tradition rather than documentation, to San Francisco during the Gold Rush decades. Its appearance in Lowney's Cook Book — a general household manual published by the Walter M. Lowney chocolate company and compiled by Maria Willett Howard — shows how quickly such restaurant novelties reached the home table. The reliance on Worcestershire, catsup, horseradish and Tabasco also dates the recipe neatly: all four were widely available bottled goods by 1907, and a cook could assemble this without making a single component from scratch.