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Scalloped Clams
Wash thoroughly six or eight good sized clam shells, fill them with clam forcemeat, flatten them with the hand, spread over sifted breadcrumbs, smooth with the blade of a knife, and moisten with a little clarified butter. Arrange them on a baking pan and bake until they are well browned, or for about six minutes. Place them on a hot dish, and serve at once, with sprigs of parsley for garnish.
This is a finishing recipe rather than a complete one: it assumes you already have a bowl of Oscar's clam forcemeat and only tells you how to dress, crumb and brown it in the shells. Read it as the last five minutes of a longer job.
- The missing componentThe recipe depends on a clam forcemeat given elsewhere in the book: chopped clams bound with breadcrumbs or a thick panade and seasoned, and evidently already cooked before it goes into the shells, since six minutes will not cook a raw filling. Without it this page produces nothing; use any cooked chopped-clam stuffing and treat the six minutes as browning time only.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given; the recipe works by eye ("bake until they are well browned"). To brown a crumb top in about six minutes you need a hot oven, roughly 425-450F in modern terms, or a broiler element about 6 inches away with the pan watched constantly.
- Why the time is so shortThe forcemeat is already cooked and only needs heating through and a browned crust. Extended baking dries the clam mixture and turns it grainy, which is the usual fault in this dish.
- The shellsReserve the shells from the clams you chopped for the forcemeat. Scrub them, boil them a few minutes, and dry them; hinge fragments and grit are the real hazard here. Deep hard-shell (quahog) halves hold a filling far better than soft-shell.
- Clarified butterMelt butter gently and pour off the clear fat, leaving the milk solids behind. It matters at this heat — whole butter's solids scorch before the crumbs colour.
- Breadcrumbs"Sifted breadcrumbs" means dry crumbs from stale bread pushed through a sieve, not packaged crumbs and not fresh ones. Fine and even is the point, so the surface browns as one sheet.
- Keeping them levelSet the filled shells on a bed of coarse salt or crumpled foil in the pan. Rounded shells rock, the butter runs off one side, and the browning goes uneven.
- YieldSix or eight shells serve two to four as a first course. They cannot be held — the crumb softens within a few minutes, which is why the original insists on a hot dish and serving at once.
Oscar Tschirky, the ma tre d'h tel whose name carried the Waldorf's kitchen into print in 1896, was writing for a New York in which clams were cheap, abundant and eaten in enormous quantity — raw at the bar, in chowder, fried, and baked back into their own shells like this. Serving a chopped, seasoned filling in the scrubbed half-shell is the same idea that a later generation of New York kitchens dressed up with bacon and pepper as clams casino, a dish usually attributed to Julius Keller at the Narragansett Pier Casino, a casino dining room, around 1917 — two decades after this book appeared. The word "scalloped" here is often said to retain its older sense of something cooked in a shell with crumbs, rather than the modern meaning of a layered casserole, and the recipe relies on a forcemeat listed elsewhere in the volume.