Clam Soup
25 small clams. 1 pint milk. Pinch of mace. 1 hard-boiled egg. 1/2 teaspoon chopped parsley 1 rolled cracker 2 tablespoons butter 1/2 teaspoon flour Wash the clam shells very clean; place them in a pan in the oven for about five minutes, or until the shells open; then remove them from the shells, saving all the juice. Unless the clams are small chop them very fine. Heat the milk; add the juice, the mace, parsley, egg, rolled cracker, and the butter mixed with the flour. Last of all add the clams; bring to a boil and serve.
A loose-leaf page that has lost half its ingredient list: the method calls for milk, mace, an egg and the clams themselves, none of which appear in the quantities given. Treat the printed list as a fragment and scale from the clams.
- The missing quantitiesOnly parsley, cracker, butter and flour survive with amounts. For a soup of this style, a quart of milk, a blade of mace, one egg and a couple of dozen small hard clams would be a plausible proportion, but that is reconstruction, not what the page says. Nothing in the original tells you the intended yield.
- Opening the clamsFive minutes in the oven is a rough guide, not a rule, and the page names no oven heat. Pull each clam the moment it gapes. Discard any that stay shut after the rest have opened.
- Save and strain the liquorThe juice carries most of the flavour. Strain it through a coffee filter or damp cloth before it goes into the milk, as grit released during opening settles in it and will not cook out.
- The hinge: do not really boil it"Bring to a boil and serve" is the one instruction to disobey. Clams toughen within a minute of hard heat, and milk with an egg in it will curdle. Bring the milk just to a shiver, add the clams, and take it off as soon as it steams again.
- The eggBeat it and temper it with a ladle of the hot milk before it goes into the pot, or it will thread. The recipe assumes a cook who knows this.
- Rolled crackerA plain soda or water cracker crushed to crumbs, used as a light thickener. The page calls for one; modern saltines work, though they are saltier, so hold back on seasoning until the end.
- MaceThe lacy covering of the nutmeg, sold as blades or ground. Ground nutmeg substitutes at about half the quantity, but it is sweeter and more assertive.
- Butter and flourTwo tablespoons butter worked with half a teaspoon of flour behaves like a beurre manie, though with far less flour than the usual near-equal-parts mixture; it is there to give body rather than real thickness. It should barely coat a spoon.
Milk-based clam soups were standard on the Atlantic coast long before the word "chowder" narrowed to mean something with potatoes and pork. Opening clams in the oven rather than by knife, as here, spares the cook the shucking, though it costs a little of the liquor to evaporation. Rolled cracker serves as the thickener, alongside the flour this recipe also calls for. The loose-leaf format that gives this book its name let cooks pull single pages for use at the stove, which is very likely how this one came to lose the top half of its ingredient list.