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Salt (Clean clams drain from their)
Clean clams, drain from their liquor, and chop. Beat eggs until light, add milk and flour mixed and sifted with baking powder, then add chopped clams, and season highly with salt and pepper. Drop by spoonfuls, and fry in deep fat.
Drain on brown paper, and serve at once on a folded napkin.
This is Fannie Farmer's clam fritter batter, printed here without its ingredient column, so the proportions have to be reconstructed. The method itself is sound and the frying is the part worth attention.
- Missing quantitiesThe verbatim text gives no amounts. A workable version of the standard Boston Cooking-School fritter batter is 1 cup flour, 1½ teaspoons baking powder, ¼ teaspoon salt, 2 eggs, and about ½ cup milk, folded around a pint of chopped clams. Treat that as a reconstruction, not the book's own figures.
- ClamsA pint of shucked clams is on the order of two to three dozen littlenecks, or fewer if you are using large quahogs, which yield much more meat apiece; yields vary, so go by volume of shucked meat rather than a count. Chop them fairly fine; large pieces of quahog toughen in the fryer while the batter is still pale.
- Save the liquorThe recipe says to drain the clams and then never uses the liquor. Reserve it and replace part of the milk with it, or keep it for chowder. Discarding it throws away most of the clam flavour.
- Deep fat"Deep fat" in this period would have meant lard, or lard cut with beef suet. Period practice judged the heat by how quickly a cube of bread browned, with uncooked batters like this one given the longer, cooler test rather than the short one used for already-cooked mixtures; in modern terms aim for the lower end of frying heat, around 350-365F. Use a thermometer; batter dropped into cool fat absorbs it and goes heavy.
- Batter consistencyIt should hold its shape on the spoon and drop reluctantly. Too thin and the fritters flatten and spread in the fat, too thick and the centre stays raw while the outside colours.
- Brown paperBrown paper of the sort a grocer's bag was made from is what the instruction means. Use a rack over a sheet pan instead, which keeps the undersides from steaming soft, or paper towel if you prefer.
- Seasoning"Season highly" is deliberate: the batter dilutes the clams considerably, and undersalted fritters taste of nothing but fried flour. Fry one as a test and adjust before committing the rest.
- YieldThe reconstructed batter above makes roughly 20 to 24 tablespoon-sized fritters, enough for four as a course. Eat them immediately, as the recipe directs; they soften and toughen quickly on standing.
Clam fritters were a New England kitchen staple as well as a restaurant item — a way of stretching a small haul of soft-shells or a few quahogs across a family with flour, egg and milk. Fannie Farmer groups them with the small made dishes served between fish and roast in a nineteenth-century dinner, and the instruction to serve them on a folded napkin is often read as a mark of that setting: the napkin absorbed residual grease and suggested the dish had come straight from the fat. The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book of 1896 is remembered for standardising level measurements, which makes the absence of quantities on this page more likely a fault of transcription than of the original.