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Clam Soup with Poached Eggs
1 quart clams 4 cups milk 1 slice onion 1/3 cup butter White 1 egg 2 tablespoons flour 1½ teaspoons salt 1/8 teaspoon pepper Few gratings nutmeg Clean and pick over clams, using three-fourths cup cold water; reserve liquor. Put aside soft part of clams; finely chop hard part, add to liquor, bring gradually to boilingpoint, strain through cheesecloth, and thicken with butter and flour cooked together. Scald milk with onion, remove onion, add milk, seasonings, and soft part of clams. Bring to boiling-point and pour over whites of eggs beaten stiff.
A thin New England clam soup built on two separate bases — a thickened clam broth and a scalded milk — combined at the last moment. The name refers not to whole eggs but to spoonfuls of stiff egg white floated on top, which set in the hot soup and resemble small poached eggs.
- The hinge: the soft parts go in lastOnly the tough hard part (the neck or siphon) is chopped and simmered for flavour; the soft bellies go in at the very end and want only brief heating in the hot milk. Cooking them along with the broth toughens them.
- A quart of clamsThis means a quart of shucked clams with their liquor, not clams in the shell. Buying shucked clams in a tub with the juice is the nearest modern equivalent; the number of clams needed will depend entirely on their size.
- "Clean and pick over"Soft-shell clams hold sand in the siphon. Rinsing the meats in the three-quarter cup of cold water called for, then letting any grit settle and straining the liquor through cheesecloth, is the whole reason for those two steps.
- The butter and flourOne-third cup butter to 2 tablespoons flour is not a conventional roux ratio; it is a very loose, buttery thickening that gives body and richness rather than a true velouté. Expect a soup barely thicker than the milk itself. If you want it to hold together, use 3 tablespoons butter to the 2 of flour and let the rest of the butter go in as enrichment.
- Scalding the milkScalded means brought to about 180F, when the surface shivers and a ring of bubbles forms at the edge — not boiled. The slice of onion infuses during this step and is lifted out.
- CurdlingClam liquor is salty, and 4 cups of milk brought to a boil against it can break, even though the recipe directs boiling-point. Combine off the heat, return gently, and stop as soon as it steams.
- The "poached eggs"Beat the white of one egg to stiff peaks and drop it in spoonfuls into the tureen, then pour the hot soup over. The heat of the soup barely sets them; those who prefer their whites fully cooked should poach the spoonfuls in simmering water first and float them.
- SaltA teaspoon and a half is generous given that clam liquor is already saline. Season at the end, after tasting.
- YieldServes four to six as a first course. Made with a quart of milk and no potato or cracker, it is a light soup rather than a chowder.
This belongs to the family of New England milk-based clam soups that sit between a broth and a chowder — no salt pork, no potato, no crackers, just clams, milk and butter. The distinction the recipe draws between the "hard part" and the "soft part" of the clam separates the tough muscle from the tender belly, each needing its own treatment. The floated egg whites are a garnish of a kind that recurs throughout the soup chapters of late nineteenth-century cookbooks, where a plain broth was routinely dressed up with something white and buoyant — beaten whites, custard royale, forcemeat balls — to give it presence at table. The title is a small piece of menu-writing rather than a description of the method.