Another Way
When stock is drawn off, season with celery salt. A little vermicelli boiled in it for fifteen minutes will give it more body-or some of the fancy letters, stars, triangles, etc., that are made particularly for soups can be used, or egg-balls can be made by mixing raw egg with just enough wheat flour or corn starch to make it into round balls, then drop them into the soup and boil for ten minutes. A little milk, a tea-spoon to one egg, is an improvement; also a sprinkle of salt. These balls are sometimes called "noodles." If a richer soup is needed, take slices of raw veal and a little salt pork, and chop very fine with a slice of wheat bread. Season highly with pepper, salt, tomato catsup, and chopped lemon peel, moisten with two well-beaten eggs, and roll into balls as large as a walnut, with floured hands. Fry the balls in butter to a dark brown, and let them cool; turn into the soup and boil about ten minutes. Cut a lemon into very thin bits, slice two hard-boiled eggs, put them into the tureen; add a glass of claret or port wine to them and turn in soup; it is a very "dainty dish."
CLAM SOUP.* First catch your clams-along the ebbing edges Of saline coves you'll find the precious wedges, With backs up, lurking in the sandy bottom; Pull in your iron rake, and lo! you've got 'em!
Take thirty large ones, put a basin under, And cleave, with knife, their stony jaws asunder; Add water (three quarts) to the native liquor, Bring to a boil, (and, by the way, the quicker It boils the better, if you'd do it cutely.) Now add the clams, chopped up and minced minutely.
Allow a longer boil of just three minutes, And while it bubbles, quickly stir within its Tumultuous depths where still the mollusks mutter, Four table-spoons of flour and four of butter, A pint of milk, some pepper to your notion, And clams need salting, although born of ocean.
Remove from fire; (if much boiled they will suffer- You'll find that India-rubber is n't tougher.) After 'tis off, add three fresh eggs, well-beaten, Stir once more, and it's ready to be eaten.
Fruit of the wave! O, dainty and delicious!
Food for the gods! Ambrosia for Apicius!
Worthy to thrill the soul of sea-born Venus, Or titillate the palate of Silenus!
Two things sit on this page: a set of garnishes for a plain meat stock, and a clam chowder-soup set out in rhyming couplets. Both assume a cook who already knows how to make broth.
- The hinge: three minutesThe verse is right and it means it. Chopped clams need about three minutes at a simmer; past that they tighten into the india-rubber the poem warns of. Everything else in the soup can be adjusted, but the clams cannot be given more time.
- Thirty large clamsThirty quahogs or large hard-shell clams give a substantial quantity of chopped meat and liquor, though how much depends on their size and no exact figure can be pinned down. Shucking raw over a basin, as directed, saves the liquor; steaming them open is easier and the liquor can be strained through cloth to catch sand.
- Flour and butter, stirred in dryFour tablespoons of each dropped straight into boiling liquid will lump. Cook them together into a blond roux first, or work the butter and flour into a paste (beurre manie) and whisk it in bit by bit.
- The eggs at the endThree beaten eggs stirred into soup already off the fire will thicken it but may not reach a temperature that kills salmonella. Temper them with a ladle of hot soup and return the pan to low heat, stirring, until it thickens without boiling; pasteurized eggs remove the question entirely.
- Egg-balls and "noodles"Raw egg bound with just enough flour or cornstarch to roll is a dumpling batter, not pasta. Keep the balls small, drop them into simmering rather than hard-boiling stock, and expect ten minutes to be about right for pieces the size of a marble.
- The veal forcemeat ballsA forcemeat: raw veal, salt pork and bread chopped fine, bound with egg -- though unlike a quenelle these are floured and fried rather than poached. The mixture can be pulsed in a food processor and chilled before rolling. Fry them through, not merely brown, since ten minutes in soup is not much cooking for raw veal.
- Fancy letters and starsThe alphabet and star shapes sold for soups are still made; look for pastina, stelline or alfabeto in the dried pasta aisle. Fifteen minutes is long for modern vermicelli, which is generally done in a good deal less.
- Claret in the tureenA "glass" in books of this period is usually reckoned at around two fluid ounces of red wine, poured over the sliced lemon and hard-boiled egg before the hot soup goes in. It is a finishing note for the clear stock, not for the clam soup.
- YieldThe clam soup, at three quarts of water plus liquor and a pint of milk, comes to something over three quarts of finished soup -- eight or more servings depending how generously it is ladled.
Recipes in verse were a small fashion in nineteenth-century American cookery writing, printed in newspapers and household columns and then copied into compilations like this one; the clam soup rhyme opens with a joke on the old cookbook formula "first catch your" (generally traced to jests about Hannah Glasse, who never actually wrote it about a hare). The Dixie Cook Book belongs to the family of large subscription compilations that grew out of the Buckeye Cookery tradition, assembled from contributed receipts rather than written by one hand, which is why a page of stock garnishes runs straight into a poem. The clams themselves place it: hard-shell clams raked from tidal flats were cheap Atlantic-coast food, and the instruction to add water to "the native liquor" reflects a time when shucking your own was the ordinary way to get them.