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Little-Neck Clams Served Raw
Wash a number of these clams in water, scrubbing them with a brush, wipe them dry on a cloth, open and cut them clear from their shells. Place five on a plate on the half shells, placing half a lemon in the center of the plate, and serve with crackers and a small dish of finely chopped cold cabbage. Soft Clams, Ancient Style Take a dozen nice, large, soft clams, wash them well and open them, keeping only one part of the shell with the clam. Put a piece of butter on each clam and plenty of Paprika pepper and a little strip of raw bacon. Put the clams on a roasting pan, which place in a hot oven for about ten minutes and serve it on the pan in which the clams have been cooked.
Two clam preparations run together in the original: a raw half-shell service and a quick baked dish of soft clams. Both are short on numbers, so a few things are worth pinning down.
- What a little-neck isThe smallest market size of the hard-shell clam Mercenaria mercenaria, roughly 1 to 2 inches across. Larger grades of the same species are sold as topnecks, cherrystones and chowders; the largest grades are generally reckoned too tough for raw service and go to chowder.
- YieldFive clams to a plate is a small first-course portion. A modern raw plate usually runs six to twelve, so buy accordingly — a dozen clams per person if this is the whole appetizer.
- Sourcing the raw onesBuy only tagged, refrigerated clams from a dealer who can show provenance, keep them cold, and discard any that stay open when tapped. Raw shellfish carries a real Vibrio and norovirus risk that no amount of scrubbing removes, which is why the shellfish tag exists.
- "Cut them clear from their shells"Sever the adductor muscles top and bottom so the clam sits loose in the half shell, then leave it there with its liquor. Do not rinse after shucking; the liquor is most of the flavor.
- The chopped cabbageThe recipe puts it in its own small dish rather than on the plate, and specifies nothing beyond very finely chopped raw cabbage, cold. It plausibly does the job horseradish or mignonette does at a raw bar now. If you salt it, drain it first so it does not weep.
- "Hot oven"Read that as roughly 425–450°F. Ten minutes at that heat is enough to set the clams and render the bacon fat, and much longer will make them leathery.
- Soft clams are a different animalSoft-shell clams (steamers, Mya arenaria) have thin, gaping shells and a long siphon. Purge them in cold salted water for an hour to shed sand, and expect to trim the tough tip of the neck; they are rarely served raw the way the little-necks above are.
- The baconA thin strip of raw bacon will render but not crisp in ten minutes. Slice it paper-thin, or partly cook it first and finish the clams under the broiler for the last minute.
Little Neck Bay, on the north shore of Long Island, gave its name to the small hard clams shipped from there in the second half of the nineteenth century, and by the time Oscar Tschirky was maître d'hôtel at the Waldorf the term had become a size grade used far from the bay itself. The raw plate here belongs to the era's oyster-and-clam bar service: a cold shellfish course, lemon, crackers, and a sharp cold relish to open a long menu, with cabbage doing the work that horseradish or a vinegar mignonette does now. "Ancient Style" was a common bit of menu French-by-way-of-English in this period, generally used to suggest a plain, old-fashioned treatment rather than any documented historical recipe — in this case butter, paprika and bacon under quick oven heat.