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Clams Roasted or Baked in the Oven
Wash the shells well with a brush and cold water. Put them in a pan in a hot oven, and bake until the shell opens. Remove the top shell so as not to lose the liquor. Arrange them on plates and on each clam place a piece of butter and a little pepper and salt. serve.
About the simplest thing you can do with a hard-shell clam, and it still works exactly as written. The only real decisions are the heat and the clams themselves.
- "A hot oven"In period terms this is roughly 400-450F. Shells should pop within about 8-12 minutes for cherrystones; smaller littlenecks may go in 6-8. Overshooting the time rather than the temperature is what turns them tough.
- Which clamsThis calls for hard-shell clams — littlenecks, cherrystones or quahogs — bought live. Soft-shell (steamer) clams do not close tightly and are not suited to dry oven heat.
- Buy them aliveShells should be shut, or should close when tapped. Anything gaping and unresponsive before cooking goes in the bin, and so does anything that fails to open in the oven.
- Purging the gritThe book says only to scrub. Quahogs off a sandy bottom benefit from 20-30 minutes in cold salted water first, which lets them spit out sand you would otherwise get in the liquor.
- The liquor is the pointWork over the pan when you lift the top shell, and set the clams on the plate level. The small pool of juice in each shell is most of the seasoning; butter, pepper and salt are just there to meet it.
- Pan choiceUse a rimmed sheet pan or shallow roasting pan, hinge-side down where you can manage it, so escaping liquor collects rather than running onto the oven floor.
- YieldSix clams per person as a first course, a dozen or more as a light main. They cool fast in the shell, so bake in batches and serve straight from the oven.
Roasting clams in their own shells is older than any cookbook — it is what shell heaps on both American coasts record, and the New England clambake is the same operation carried out on hot stones under seaweed. The Butterick Cook Book, published for a pattern and magazine house selling to middle-class households in the early 1910s, includes it at a point when the closed kitchen range had made the technique domestic: no fire pit, no seaweed, just a hot oven and a brush. The instruction to save the liquor suggests a familiarity with clams; the butter, salt and pepper are a genteel finish on a food that was long cheap and gathered rather than bought.