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Clam Broth
Scrub two dozen perfectly fresh clams, and add one half cup of boiling water, and steam until the clams open. Strain off the juice very carefully and serve plain or with cream, or whipped cream. Season with salt.
A two-ingredient broth whose success depends entirely on the clams and on how carefully the liquor is strained. Everything else is a matter of a few minutes' attention.
- The clams"Perfectly fresh" means alive: shells shut tight, or closing when tapped. Two dozen hard-shell clams, if that is what is meant, should give something on the order of a cup or more of liquor, which with the added half cup makes two or three small cupfuls. Discard any that stay open before cooking or refuse to open after.
- Purge the grit firstScrubbing cleans the outside only. Rest the clams in cold salted water for 20-30 minutes so they expel sand; otherwise the broth may be gritty even after careful straining.
- Steaming timeHalf a cup of boiling water in a covered pan opens littlenecks in about 4-6 minutes, cherrystones in 6-9. Pull each one as it gapes; clams held past that point tighten into rubber, and the broth turns cloudy and flat.
- Straining "very carefully"This is the hinge of the recipe. Let the liquor settle off the heat, then pour it through a fine sieve lined with damp muslin or a coffee filter, stopping before the sediment at the bottom of the pan follows.
- Salt with restraintClam liquor is already saline, often 1 percent or more. Taste before adding anything.
- With creamUse about one part cream to three parts broth, warmed but not boiled — broth and cream both curdle if pushed hard. The whipped cream is presumably a spoonful floated on the hot broth rather than folded through, though the recipe does not say.
- Don't waste the clamsThe recipe uses only the liquor. The steamed meats are perfectly good chopped into chowder or a hash, though the recipe says nothing about what became of them.
Invalid cookery had its own chapter in many American household manuals of the period, and clam broth was one of its staples: light, salty, faintly stimulating, and thought to be retained by stomachs that would reject solid food or even beef tea. Its appearance in a temperance collection is no accident. Books of this kind set out to prove that every use claimed for spirits — something warming to hand a caller, something to order at a counter — had a sober equivalent, and hot clam broth served in a bouillon cup was among the common answers, sold at soda fountains and oyster bars along the eastern seaboard through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The medical reasoning was mostly wrong; the broth is essentially seawater with dissolved shellfish protein, valuable chiefly for salt and fluid, which is not nothing for someone who has been feverish. The whipped-cream finish suggests that this was meant to tempt an appetite as much as to nourish one.