Creamed Clams
Scald the clams in their own liquor. If opened by steaming save the liquor to use. Chop the clams into dice and to each cup of clams add one cup of white sauce made as usual except that only half of the ordinary quantity of milk is used, the strained clam liquor being substituted for the other half. Serve on toast and garnish with parsley.
A short creamed-shellfish dish that assumes you already know the house white sauce and have a bowl of clam liquor from shucking or steaming. Two things decide whether it works: how briefly the clams cook, and whether you salt before tasting.
- The hinge: barely cook themScalding means bringing the liquor just to a simmer and pulling the clams the moment they firm, well under a minute for chopped meats. Held at a simmer for even five minutes they turn to rubber, and reheating them in the sauce counts as cooking time.
- "White sauce made as usual"Period cookbooks give white sauce in thin, medium and thick grades; a medium sauce of about 2 tablespoons butter, 2 tablespoons flour and 1 cup liquid, cooked until the flour loses its raw smell, suits this dish. Here the cup is half milk, half strained clam liquor.
- Salt last, or not at allClam liquor is aggressively saline and varies wildly from one batch to another. Build the sauce unsalted, add the liquor, then taste; many batches need nothing.
- Strain, and mean itThe instruction to strain the liquor is about sand, not clarity. Let it settle, pour off the top and leave the last spoonful behind, or run it through a coffee filter or fine muslin.
- How many clamsA cup of chopped meats is perhaps a dozen to two dozen shucked hard-shell clams depending on size, since quahogs are much larger than cherrystones, or a few pounds in the shell if you steam them open. Canned chopped clams with their juice will fill in, though the flavor is flatter.
- YieldOne cup of clams with one cup of sauce serves two on toast as a light supper, or four as a first course.
- The toast mattersThick-cut bread, well toasted and dry, holds up under a thin cream sauce. Anything soft collapses before it reaches the table; toast to order rather than in advance.
Creamed anything on toast was the standard American answer to a small quantity of protein around 1900 — a cup of clams, chipped beef or hard-boiled eggs stretched with butter, flour and milk to feed a family. What lifts this version above the general run is the substitution of clam liquor for half the milk, a trick that gives the sauce actual shellfish flavor rather than merely suspending the clams in dairy. The Butterick Cook Book (1911) came from the pattern and magazine publisher Butterick, whose Delineator reached an enormous middle-class readership, and it reflects a period when East Coast hard-shell clams were cheap and abundant. Its habit of writing "white sauce made as usual" assumes a cook who has already worked through the sauce chapter.