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Clams à la Newburg
1 pint clams 3 tablespoons butter ½ teaspoon salt Few grains cayenne 3 tablespoons Sherry or Madeira wine ½ cup thin cream Yolks 3 eggs Clean clams, remove soft parts, and finely chop hard parts. Melt butter, add chopped clams, seasonings, and wine. Cook eight minutes, add soft part of clams, and cream. Cook two minutes, then add egg yolks slightly beaten, diluted with some of the hot sauce.
A chafing-dish supper dish from the era when the chafing dish was the fashionable way to cook in front of guests. The technique is a Newburg sauce, and it fails in exactly one place: the eggs.
- The hinge: never let it boil after the yolks go inThe yolks are tempered with hot sauce and returned to the pan over gentle heat only. Above roughly 180F they scramble and the sauce breaks into curds and thin liquid. Off the direct flame — or in the water-bath half of a chafing dish — is the safest place to finish.
- "1 pint clams"This means a pint of shucked clams with their liquor, not a pint of clams in the shell. Roughly two dozen medium hard-shell clams, or about a pound of shucked meat. Reserve the liquor; it can replace part of the cream.
- Hard parts and soft partsThe "hard part" is the adductor muscle and the tough foot and mantle rim, which get the full eight minutes to tenderize. The "soft part" is the belly and other soft body tissue, which goes in at the end and needs only a couple of minutes.
- Thin creamThin cream of this period is usually taken to be around 18 to 20 percent butterfat, closest to today's light cream; half-and-half is thinner still. Heavy cream will work and is more forgiving of heat, but the sauce will be noticeably richer than intended.
- SaltA tablespoon of butter to each half-teaspoon of salt is a lot, and clams and their liquor are already saline. Start with half the salt and correct at the end.
- The wineSherry or Madeira here means a dry to medium style — amontillado or Sercial/Verdelho — not cream sherry. It goes in early so the alcohol cooks off during the eight minutes.
- Yield and servingServes three to four as a light supper or first course. The standard accompaniment of the period is buttered toast points or puff-pastry shells; rice also carries it well.
Newburg sauce — butter, cream, egg yolks and fortified wine — is generally traced to Delmonico's in New York in the 1870s, where it is traditionally said to have been introduced as lobster à la Wenberg for a sea captain of that name and renamed after a falling-out with the house. Whatever the truth of the story, the formula had by this point detached itself from lobster entirely and was applied to shrimp, crab, oysters, sweetbreads and, as here, clams. The chafing dish was the late-Victorian equivalent of tableside cooking, and a sauce built in ten minutes from cream, butter and a splash of the sideboard sherry was exactly what the apparatus was for.