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Clam and Egg Scramble
1 dozen clams 5 eggs Salt and pepper 4 tablespoons clam juice 1 tablespoon butter Wash and scrub the clams; put them in a saucepan with half a cup of water; cover closely and cook until the shells open. Remove the clams and save the juice for bouillon or other purposes. Chop the clams fine. Beat the eggs slightly; add the clams and four tablespoons of the juice. Melt the butter in the chafing dish; turn in the mixture and stir over hot water until cooked to a soft scramble. Dust with salt and pepper and serve.
A chafing-dish supper dish that works perfectly well on a stovetop, provided you keep the eggs over water rather than over direct flame.
- The chafing dishThe recipe says to stir over hot water, so the blazer pan is used with its water pan beneath: this is scrambled eggs cooked in a double boiler. A metal or glass bowl over a pan of barely simmering water does the same job; expect something like 8 to 12 minutes of near-constant stirring rather than the two or three minutes of a hot skillet.
- Which clamsA dozen clams for five eggs suggests small hardshells — littlenecks or cherrystones. Larger quahogs would give far more meat than five eggs can carry; two or three of those would be closer to the proportion.
- Steaming them openCovered, over high heat, they take 5 to 8 minutes. Pull each one as it gapes rather than waiting for the last, or the early openers toughen. Discard any that stay shut after the rest are done.
- Strain the juiceThe liquor picks up sand from the shells no matter how well you scrub. Pour it through a coffee filter or a doubled cloth before measuring out the four tablespoons, and keep the rest for chowder or bouillon as directed.
- Chop fine, and mean itSteamed clam is chewy in a soft scramble. A fine mince, not a rough chop, keeps the texture even; a few pulses in a food processor is faster and no worse.
- Salt at the endThe recipe seasons after cooking for good reason — clam juice is already salty, and four tablespoons of it in five eggs carries a lot. Taste before adding any.
- YieldTwo servings as a light supper, three if there is toast alongside. Serve immediately; eggs held in a chafing dish over its lamp will keep tightening.
Chafing-dish cookery had a long vogue in American households between roughly the 1880s and the 1920s, and books of the period often carried a chapter of it. The appeal seems to have been social as much as culinary: the dish sat on the table over a spirit lamp, so a hostess could cook in front of guests without a servant or a trip to the kitchen, which suited late suppers after the theatre and the smaller, staffless households then becoming common. The repertoire was accordingly narrow — things that cook fast and forgive an unreliable flame, which is to say eggs, cheese, cream sauces and shellfish. Clams were an obvious partner on the Atlantic coast, cheap and sold live in quantity, and pairing them with eggs stretched a dozen shellfish into a meal. The instruction to save the liquor "for bouillon or other purposes" fits a period in which clam broth was also drunk hot in cups as a restorative, much as beef tea was.