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Clams a La Creme
1 pint clams 2 tablespoons butter Salt, pepper and nutmeg Yolks of 2 eggs 1/2 cup cream Buttered toast 1 tablespoon chopped parsley Separate the hard from the soft parts of the clams and chop the hard parts fine. Melt the butter in the chafing dish; add a little salt, pepper and grated nutmeg, then the clams; bring all to a boil. Beat together the eggs and the cream; stir into the hot mixture; bring to a boil and serve on squares of buttered toast. Sprinkle the parsley lightly over the top.
A chafing-dish supper dish that depends almost entirely on restraint at one moment: the egg and cream go in at the end and must not actually boil, whatever the original says.
- Ignore the second "bring to a boil"Once the yolks and cream are stirred in, hold the pan below a simmer, around 170-175F, and stir until the sauce coats the spoon. Boiling will scramble the yolks and break the sauce into curds and liquid.
- A pint of clamsThis means a pint of shucked clams with their liquor, roughly a pound, which is what a fish counter may sell as shucked soft-shell or steamer clams. If you shuck your own, the number of clams needed varies a good deal with size, so measure the meats rather than count shells.
- Hard and soft partsSoft-shell clams have a tough neck and siphon and a soft belly; the instruction to chop the hard parts fine is what keeps the dish from being chewy. With larger quahogs the tough parts still want chopping fine; small littlenecks can be chopped whole. Peel or discard the black skin at the tip of the siphon.
- Clam liquorSave whatever liquid comes off the clams and add a spoonful or two with them. Without it, the sauce is mostly butter and cream and tastes flat.
- Clams cook in secondsBring the butter and clams just to the point of bubbling and no further, about a minute. Prolonged heat turns clams to rubber, and they will get a second, gentler cooking while the sauce thickens.
- SeasoningSalt lightly and taste at the end; clam liquor is already salty. The grated nutmeg is not a garnish here but the period's standard partner to cream and shellfish, and a scant eighth of a teaspoon is enough for this quantity.
- The chafing dishA spirit lamp gives gentle heat, and when the blazer sits over a hot-water pan the heat is indirect, which may be part of why the recipe can get away with telling you to boil twice. In a modern pan over gas or induction, use low heat and pull the pan off the burner before the eggs go in.
- Yield and toastServes three as a light course, two as a supper. Cut the toast into squares and butter it just before serving, and have it ready before the eggs go in, since the sauce will not wait.
Chafing-dish cookery had a long vogue in American households from the 1890s through the 1910s, and cookbooks of the period routinely gave it its own chapter. The appeal was social rather than culinary: the dish was made at the table, by the hostess or the host, in a room without a servant, and the repertoire accordingly ran to things that cook in minutes over a small spirit flame — eggs, cheese, chicken livers, lobster and above all clams and oysters, which were cheap and abundant on both coasts. The pattern here — shellfish warmed in butter, then bound with egg yolks and cream and served on toast — is a thinned descendant of the French liaison, and similar preparations appear in period books under "à la crème." The nutmeg is the older note: English and American cooks had been grating it over creamed shellfish since the eighteenth century.