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Cabob-Ed Clams
Open clams freshly, remove from shells and marinate 1 hour in equal quantities olive oil, lemon juice and prepared mustard. Then cabob them by stringing on skewers with strips of bacon between and broiling lightly.
A three-line campfire recipe that assumes you know your way around a shucking knife and a bed of coals. The whole thing hinges on how briefly the clams meet the fire.
- The one thing that mattersClams on a skewer are done in about two to four minutes total over hot coals, turned once. Anything longer and they shrink to erasers. Pull them the moment the edges curl and the bacon has coloured.
- Which clamsUse large hard-shell clams -- cherrystones or small quahogs -- which have enough body to stay on a skewer. Soft-shell steamers and small littlenecks tear apart and are not worth the trouble. Figure six to eight clams per person, so twelve to sixteen cherrystones for two.
- "Cabob"An older spelling of kebab, used here as a verb: to thread on a skewer and grill. The book is not asking for anything beyond skewering.
- The marinadeEqual parts is a workable ratio at small volume -- two tablespoons each of olive oil, lemon juice and mustard will coat two dozen clams. "Prepared mustard" means a bottled mustard paste, not dry mustard powder.
- An hour in acidLemon juice firms and partly denatures shellfish over an hour, which may help the clams hold together on the skewer. There is little to gain from pushing much past the hour.
- The baconCut the bacon into pieces roughly the width of a clam, and if using thick-cut, give it a minute in a pan first so it renders in step with the clams rather than lagging behind them.
- Skewers and dripsSoak wooden skewers thirty minutes, or use metal. Shake the marinade off before the clams go over the fire -- oil dripping onto coals produces flare-ups that will scorch the bacon before the clams are warm.
Skewered, bacon-wrapped shellfish belong to a family of chafing-dish and grill dishes that ran through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the best known being angels on horseback -- oysters wrapped in bacon and broiled. The word cabob reached English cookbooks through Anglo-Indian usage in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and was applied loosely to almost anything threaded on a skewer, well before kebab settled as the standard spelling. Its appearance in an outdoor-cooking book is telling: clams were cheap, abundant, and could be opened where they were dug, so a shore party needed nothing but a knife, a few green sticks and a fire.