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Clam Broth
When frying or making a scallop of soft clams it is unwise to put in the long, hard neck portions, for they are not eaten. Use these for broth. Put them through a meat chopper, with a few whole clams, add a little water, salt as needed, and a little pepper. Simmer gently for a few minutes, strain, and serve hot or cold. This is an excellent tonic.
A thrift recipe: the tough siphon of the soft-shell clam, useless in a fry or a scallop, still holds most of the flavor. The whole procedure hinges on brief cooking — clam broth turns muddy and metallic if it is allowed to boil.
- Soft clamsThese are steamers (Mya arenaria), the thin-shelled clams with a long protruding siphon. That siphon, called the neck, is leathery and is what the recipe tells you to save. Hard-shell clams (quahogs, littlenecks) have only a short retractable siphon, not a protruding neck of this kind.
- Meat chopperA hand-cranked grinder. Short pulses in a food processor do the same job; you want the necks broken up, not pureed.
- Water quantityThe original gives none, only 'a little water.' Little enough to barely cover the chopped necks and clams keeps the flavor concentrated; the more water, the closer it gets to salted water.
- SaltThe recipe salts at the start ('salt as needed'), but clams carry their own liquor, so it is safer to under-salt and correct at the end.
- Simmer time'A few minutes' is all it takes; keep it at a bare tremble rather than a rolling boil, which is generally held to cloud the broth.
- StrainingStrain through a fine sieve lined with a double thickness of cheesecloth. Clams hold grit no matter how well they were purged, and it settles into the broth.
- FreshnessUse the necks the same day the clams are opened, and discard any clam that was gaping and did not close when handled before shucking.
Clam broth held a peculiar double life around 1900: it was both a bar drink and a sickroom staple. Clam and oyster houses on the Eastern seaboard are said to have sold cups of it over the counter, while household and invalid-cookery manuals of the same decades recommended it for convalescents on the theory that a hot, salty, easily digested liquid restored strength — hence the closing line here, "an excellent tonic," a claim made for beef tea and mutton broth on the same grounds and with the same absence of evidence. The soft clam's siphon is genuinely unpleasant fried, and a cookbook built on using up what the kitchen would otherwise throw out could hardly leave it in the scrap bowl.