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Clam Pie
Take three pints of either hard or soft-shell clams (if large, chop slightly), put in a sauce-pan and bring to a boil in their own liquor, or add a little water if needed; have ready four medium-sized po tatoes, boiled till done and cut into small squares; make a nice pie paste with which line a medium-sized pudding-dish half way down the sides; turn a small tea-cup bottom up in middle of dish to keep up the top crust; put in first a layer of clams, and then a few potatoes, season with bits of butter and a little salt and pepper, and dredge with flour; add another layer of clams, and so on till dish is filled, adding juice of clams, and a little water if necessary (there should be about as much liquid as for chicken-pic). Cover with top-crust, cutting several slits for steam to escape, and bake three quarters of an hour. - Mrs. A. Wilson, Rye, N. Y.
A plain shellfish pie of the kind that turns up all along the northeastern shore, set down here with almost no oven guidance. Two things decide whether it succeeds: how briefly the clams meet heat, and how much liquid goes under the crust.
- Don't cook the clams twiceThe clams here are evidently already shucked (they are measured by the pint and "chopped slightly" if large), so the initial boil serves only to heat them and draw out the liquor. Keep it brief: pull them as soon as they are hot. They then get another 45 minutes in the oven, and clams thoroughly simmered beforehand will come out as rubber. With bought shucked clams you can skip the boil altogether and use their packing liquor plus bottled clam juice.
- Three pints of clamsThat is three pints shucked, on the order of 2 1/2 to 3 lb of meat — a substantial amount, suited to a dish of roughly two quarts. In the shell you would need something like half a bushel of hard-shells, so buying them shucked is the sane route.
- Hard-shell or soft-shellHard-shells are quahogs; the large ones (chowder clams) are what "if large, chop slightly" refers to. Soft-shells are steamers, and their black-sheathed necks should be skinned before use or the pie is chewy.
- GritThe recipe assumes you know. Let live clams sit in cold salted water an hour before cooking, and strain the liquor through a cloth afterward — sand settles to the bottom of the pan and will otherwise go straight into the pie.
- The inverted teacupThis is a pie funnel improvised from crockery. It holds the top crust off the filling so the pastry doesn't sink and go sodden, and gives the steam somewhere to gather. A ceramic pie bird does the same job.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. A pie of this sort wants a hot start to set the bottom pastry — 425F for the first 15 minutes, then 375F for the remaining half hour, on a low rack or a preheated sheet.
- Liquid and the flour dredge"About as much liquid as for chicken-pie" means the filling should be moist and just barely swimming, not soupy; the quantity depends on the size of the dish, so judge by eye. The flour dredged over each layer is the only thickener, so be even-handed with it or the juices will stay thin.
- SaltClam liquor is already saline. Season the potato layers lightly and taste the liquor before adding anything at all.
Clam pie belongs to the coastal north — Long Island, southern New England, the shores of the Sound — where shellfish were cheap enough to be everyday food and pastry was the standard way of turning them into a substantial dinner. Its appearance in The Dixie Cook Book is a good reminder of how these late nineteenth-century compilations were actually assembled: the attribution to Mrs. A. Wilson of Rye, New York places the contributor squarely on the Westchester coast, not in the South at all. Publishers of the period are often said to have issued the same body of collected receipts under regional titles, swapping frontmatter and a handful of local dishes while the bulk of the contributions stayed put. The inverted teacup under the top crust is an older domestic trick than the manufactured pie funnel, and is generally traced to English and American kitchen writing of the period; the potatoes, meanwhile, do the same work here that they do in a chowder, stretching a pricier ingredient and soaking up the liquor.