Creamed Clams
2 dozen clams 1 tablespoon butter 1 tablespoon flour 1/2 cup clam juice 1/2 cup rich cream Salt and paprika Chop the clams fine. Melt the butter and cook the flour in it; add the clams and juice; simmer for ten minutes and add the cream. Bring to a boil; season and serve with thin slices of buttered toast.
A plain white-sauce clam dish that depends almost entirely on how long the clams cook. Everything else is a one-tablespoon roux.
- Clams and their liquorTwo dozen most likely means hard-shell clams in the shell, though the recipe does not say so; they could be shucked raw and chopped, or steamed open just until they gape and then chopped. Either way, strain and reserve the liquor — that is the half cup of "clam juice." Two 6.5-oz cans of chopped clams with their juice is a workable substitute, roughly 1 cup of meat.
- The ten minutesThis is the hinge. Clam meat toughens within a minute or two of hitting heat, and ten minutes of simmering will give you rubber. Simmer the strained juice with the roux for the ten minutes to thicken and concentrate it, then stir the chopped clams in at the end and heat through only.
- "Rich cream"In period usage this means the thickest cream available, closest to what is now sold as heavy cream; fat content varied. Half-and-half works but will not coat the toast the same way.
- The rouxOne tablespoon each of butter and flour to a cup of total liquid is a thin sauce by design — it should pour, not mound. Cook the flour a minute without letting it colour.
- Bring to a boilThe recipe does say to boil it, but there is no need to push it hard; rich cream will take a boil, though very salty clam liquor makes separation more likely. Bringing it just to the point of steaming is safer.
- SaltSalt last and sparingly. Clam liquor is already saline, and canned clam juice more so.
- YieldServes two as a light main course over toast, or four as a first course. The recipe calls for thin slices of buttered toast; the sauce is also good in pastry shells.
Creamed shellfish on toast was one of the most common ways American households of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries turned a small quantity of seafood into a meal — the same formula covers creamed oysters, creamed lobster, creamed codfish and creamed chipped beef, all built on the butter-flour-cream sauce that cookery schools of the era drilled into students as the foundation of white sauce. Cookbooks of the period leaned heavily on such short, repeatable formulas. Clams were cheap along both coasts and, in the era before reliable home refrigeration, dishes that used the shellfish the day it was bought — and its cooking liquor along with it — made practical sense.