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Clam Soup
The original rhymed recipe, by W. A. Croffut, 1877: "First catch your clams-along the ebbing edges Of saline covers you'll find the little wedges, With backs up, lurking in the sandy bottom; Pull in your iron rake and lo! You've got 'em!
Take thirty large ones. Put a basin under, And cleave, with knife their stony jaws asunder; Add water (three quarts) to the native liquor, Bring to a boil. (And, by the way, the quicker It boils the better, if you do it cutely.) Now add the clams chopped up and minced minutely, Allow a longer boil of just three minutes, And while it bubbles, quickly stir within its Tumultuous depths where still the mollusks mutter, Four tablespoonfuls of flour and four of butter, A pint of milk, some pepper to your notion, And clams need salting although born of ocean.
Remove from fire; (if much boiled they will suffer- You'll find that India rubber is not tougher.) After 'tis off add three fresh eggs, well beaten, Stir once more, and 'tis ready to be eaten.
Fruit of the wave!
Food for the gods!
O, dainty and delicious!
Ambrosia for Apicius!
Worthy to thrill the soul of Venus, Or titillate the palate of Silenus."
The verse hides a workable chowder-style soup, but the proportions are set for a crowd and two of the steps need a modern hand: the flour and butter go in raw, and the eggs go in at the end.
- What kind of clamThirty large clams raked from a sandy bottom, with "stony jaws" that must be cleaved with a knife, point to hard-shell quahogs, sold now as chowder or large cherrystone clams. Thirty of them is several pounds in the shell and will yield several cups of chopped meat, depending on their size.
- YieldThree quarts of water plus the clam liquor and a pint of milk makes close to a gallon of soup, enough for 10 to 12 servings. Halving everything is sensible for a household pot.
- Strain the liquorOpening clams over a basin catches the liquor, but it also catches grit. Let it settle and pour it off the sediment, or pass it through a fine sieve or cloth before it goes into the pot.
- The hinge: three minutes and offThe poem is blunt about this. Chopped quahog toughens fast; the verse allows a boil of just three minutes, with the flour, butter and milk stirred in while it still bubbles, and then the pot comes off the fire. Anything longer and the texture goes rubbery, exactly as warned.
- Flour and butterFour tablespoons of each stirred straight into boiling liquid will lump. Work the butter and flour together into a paste first, or cook them into a roux in a separate pan and whisk that in, and the soup will thicken cleanly.
- The eggsThree beaten eggs stirred into off-the-heat soup act as an enrichment, not a custard. Temper them: whisk a ladle of the hot soup into the eggs, then return the mixture to the pot. Added cold and direct, they scramble in threads.
- Do not reboilOnce milk and eggs are in, the soup should be served immediately. Reheating past a bare simmer curdles the eggs and toughens the clams a second time.
- If you dig your ownRecreational shellfish beds are closed at times for biotoxins and bacterial contamination. Check the current local closure notices before harvesting; the poem's cheerful iron rake predates any such warning system.