Steamed Clams
Wash and scrub clam shells; place in kettle; add water, allowing one half cup of water for each peck of clams. Cover kettle and cook until shells open. Serve hot with melted butter.
Kettle should be removed from the range as soon as shells open, otherwise clams will be overcooked.
A four-line recipe that gets the essential point right: clams are done the moment they gape, and every minute after that costs texture. The rest is measurement and cleaning.
- A peck of clamsA peck is 8 dry quarts, a quarter of a bushel. What that weighs depends entirely on the size of the clams; it is a large quantity by modern standards, well over the amount a household pot would hold today. Half a cup of water to that quantity is plausible; the clams release far more liquor than you add.
- Scale it downFor four people, figure 4-5 lb of littlenecks in a wide pot with a tight lid. Scaled from the recipe's own rate that is a few tablespoons of water, which is there only to make the first steam.
- Purge the sandScrubbing the shells cleans the outside, not the inside. Soft-shell (steamer) clams especially need 20-30 minutes in cold salted water so they spit grit; lift them out rather than pouring, so the sand stays behind.
- TimingOver high heat, littlenecks begin opening at about 5 minutes and are finished by 8-10. Pull them as they open rather than waiting for the last holdout, which is the same instinct the original expresses.
- Discard the deadA clam that gapes wide before cooking and will not close when tapped is dead and should be thrown out. One that stays shut after everything else has opened should also be discarded rather than pried.
- Save the brothThe liquor left in the pot is the best part. Decant it carefully off the sandy bottom and serve it in cups alongside the butter, which is how it has long been done in New England.
- Soft-shell clamsIf you use steamers rather than hard-shell clams, peel the dark sheath off the neck before eating and dip first in broth, then butter.
Lowney's, a Boston chocolate company, published its cookbook for a New England audience that took shellfish for granted, which is why a recipe like this can be measured in pecks and dispatched in four sentences. Steaming clams over a splash of water is the domestic kitchen's version of the shore clambake, where clams were buried with seaweed over hot stones and cooked in their own steam; the practice is generally traced to Native coastal peoples of the Northeast and was well established as a summer institution by the nineteenth century. The insistence on pulling the kettle the instant the shells open is the whole technique: a clam is essentially cooked by the time it gapes, and the recipe's one warning is the one worth keeping.