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Cayenne (Pour water over clams then)
Pour water over clams, then drain. To water add hard part of clams finely chopped. Heat slowly to boiling-point, cook twenty minutes, then strain. Cook butter with onion five minutes; remove onion, add flour and gradually clam water. Add cream, soft part of clams, and as soon as boiling-point is reached, tomatoes to which soda has been added. Season with salt and cayenne, and serve at once. 1 quart oysters
This is the method half of a clam-and-tomato bisque; the ingredient list has been lost in transmission, and the stray "1 quart oysters" at the end belongs to a neighbouring recipe. Fannie Farmer's version of this soup runs on roughly a quart of clams in the shell (or a pint shucked with their liquor), 2 tablespoons each butter and flour, a slice of onion, a cup of cream, a cup of stewed or canned tomatoes, and a few grains of soda.
- The hinge is the sodaThe pinch of baking soda goes into the tomatoes, not the soup, and it neutralises enough acid to keep the cream from curdling when the two meet. Add the tomatoes off the heat or the instant boiling point is reached, stir once, and serve; holding the combined soup over heat will break it regardless.
- Hard and soft partsShucked clams divide into the tough adductor muscle and neck (the "hard part") and the soft belly. The hard part is chopped and simmered to build the broth, the soft part goes in at the very end and needs no more than a minute of heat. Reverse them and the soup is both bland and rubbery.
- Twenty minutes is for the broth onlyThe long simmer applies to the chopped hard parts, which are extracting flavour rather than being cooked to tenderness, and the liquid is strained afterwards. The soft parts added later should not boil at all.
- "Pour water over clams, then drain"This washes off grit from the shells and shucking, and the water is kept: it becomes the base of the broth. Save any clam liquor released during shucking and strain it through cheesecloth into the pot; it carries much of the flavour.
- The onion is a flavouring, not an ingredientA slice of onion is cooked in the butter and then lifted out before the flour goes in. The point is a faint sweetness in the roux, not onion in the finished soup.
- Cook the flour before the liquidAdd the flour once the onion comes out, then add the strained clam water gradually, off the heat if it helps, to avoid lumps. This is a thin cream soup, not a chowder; it should coat a spoon lightly and no more.
- CayenneFarmer's recipes call for cayenne by "a few grains" — an eighth of a teaspoon or less. The heat should be undetectable as heat and read only as a sharpening of the clam.
- YieldA small quantity, since the ingredient list is missing from this page and cannot be reconstructed with certainty. It does not reheat or hold; the cream and tomato separate on standing, which is why the original says serve at once.
The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book appeared in 1896 under Fannie Merritt Farmer, and its soup chapter reflects a New England coast where clams were cheap and plentiful. What sets this recipe apart from the region's older chowders is the tomato, and the soda is there to keep the tomato's acid from curdling the cream. Farmer trained at the Boston Cooking School and taught cookery as an applied science, which is why a household recipe of the 1890s tells you to add a few grains of an alkali to an acid rather than simply warning you that the soup may curdle. The garbled state of this entry — method without ingredients, and a trailing "1 quart oysters" apparently from a neighbouring recipe — is the kind of artifact that arises in scanned and reset editions of a book that ran through many printings.