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Fried Soft Clams
Thoroughly wash one bunch or one pint of soft clams taken out of their shells in cold water to free them from sand and lay them separately on a towel to dry; have ready a frying kettle about half full of fat and place this over the fire. While the fat is heating, prepare a dish of beaten raw eggs and a platter full of breadcrumbs or cracker dust; roll the clams in the crumbs, then dip them in the beaten eggs; roll them once more in crumbs, and when the fat is smoking hot, place them in it and fry to a golden brown. Take them out with a skimmer, lay them on brown paper to drain off the fat and serve hot. They may be sent to the table with a garnish of lemon cut in quarters or a dish of sliced fresh or pickled cabbage.
Soft Clams, Newburg Thoroughly clean and remove all sand from about forty to forty-five soft fresh clams, place them in a stewpan with one ounce of butter, half a pinch of white pepper, a wineglassful of Madeira wine and a couple of well-hashed truffles, place on the lid and cook gently for about eight minutes; then break three egg yolks into a bowl, add a pint of sweet cream and beat thoroughly for about three minutes, then pour it over the clams, stir gently the clams for three minutes longer and pour them into a hot tureen, sending to table at once.
Two clam dishes run together in one entry: a straightforward deep fry, and a Newburg that hangs entirely on not letting the egg yolks catch. Both assume shucked soft clams, which is the part most modern cooks have to solve first.
- Soft clamsThese are steamers (Mya arenaria), the thin-shelled East Coast clam with the protruding siphon, not littlenecks or quahogs. A pint of shucked meats is roughly 25 to 30 clams; the fishmonger will shuck them if asked. Many cooks pull the tough black sheath off the siphon before frying.
- "One bunch"The recipe treats a bunch as equivalent to a pint, so the pint is what to go by; what exactly a "bunch" meant at market is unclear. Since the clams are already out of their shells, that is a pint of shucked meats, not a pint of clams in the shell.
- Getting the sand outWashing shucked meats in cold water alone will not do it. Soft clams hold grit in the belly, so purge them live in salted water for an hour or two before shucking, then rinse the meats and dry them well -- wet clams will not hold a crumb coat.
- Frying temperature"Smoking hot" fat is above the smoke point of anything you would want to eat. Fry at 375F; the clams take about a minute to a minute and a half and are done as soon as they are golden. Longer and they toughen.
- The coating orderCrumb, then egg, then crumb, as written -- the first pass of crumbs dries the surface so the egg grips. Cracker dust means finely crushed soda crackers, which fry lighter than fresh breadcrumbs.
- DrainingBrown paper was the standard drain of the period. A wire rack over a sheet pan keeps the undersides crisp; paper towels will do but the bottoms soften.
- The Newburg hingeOnce the yolk and cream go in, the pan must not boil or even properly simmer. Three minutes of gentle stirring over low heat thickens it; a moment of hard heat and it curdles into sweet scrambled egg. Pull it while it still looks slightly loose.
- WineglassfulReckon about 2 fl oz of Madeira. A pinch is conventionally taken as roughly what can be held between finger and thumb; half a pinch of white pepper is a scant pinch by modern habits.
- Quantities and yieldForty to forty-five clams with a pint of cream and three yolks serves four to six as a first course. Truffles are optional in any practical sense -- the dish works without them, though it loses the perfume Oscar was charging for.
Oscar Tschirky, the Waldorf's celebrated maître d'hôtel, published his Cook Book in 1896, at the height of the soft clam's standing as a New York delicacy: steamers came off the Long Island and New England flats in quantity, and fried clams appeared on hotel menus, chophouse cards and shore-dinner tables alike. The Newburg treatment is the interesting one -- the sauce of butter, Madeira, cream and egg yolks is generally traced to Delmonico's in the 1870s and a sea captain named Ben Wenberg, whose name is said to have been shuffled into "Newburg" after a falling-out with the house. By Oscar's day the formula, while still standard with lobster, was also being applied to crab, shrimp, terrapin and, here, clams, the truffles serving mainly to mark the dish as hotel cooking rather than home cooking.