Clam Soup
Wash clams, and place in just sufficient water for the soup, let boil, and as soon as they clear from shells, take out and place clams in a jar for pickling; throw into the broth a pint each of sweet milk and rolled crackers, add a little salt, boil five minutes, and just before taking from the fire, add one ounce butter beaten with two eggs. Serve, and let each person season to taste.
A thin, cracker-thickened clam broth of the sort that fills the soup chapters of late-nineteenth-century American compilations. The recipe assumes you already know how many clams a family needs and that you own a jar of pickle brine, so a few details need filling in.
- QuantityNo count is given. Three to four dozen hard-shell clams (about 4 lb in the shell) yields roughly a quart of broth and serves four. "Just sufficient water for the soup" means a cup or two at most; the clams release a great deal of their own liquor.
- Grit is the hingeScrub the shells and purge the clams in cold salted water before cooking, then let the finished broth settle and pour it off the sand, or strain through damp muslin. Sand ruins this soup faster than anything else, and the recipe makes no allowance for it.
- The clams leave the soupAs written, the meats go into a pickling jar and only the broth becomes soup. If you want clams in the bowl, chop them and return them off the heat at the very end; reheating them in the pot turns them to rubber within a minute or two.
- Rolled crackersHard water crackers or soda crackers crushed fine with a rolling pin, not modern saltines by the sleeve. Note that the recipe calls for a pint of crumbs to a pint of milk, which will make a very thick, porridge-like soup; add the crumbs gradually and stop when the consistency suits you.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh unsoured milk, as opposed to buttermilk or clabber. Whole milk is the right substitute.
- The egg and butter finishAn ounce of butter is 2 tablespoons. Beat it with the eggs, temper the mixture with a ladle of hot soup, then stir it in off the heat. If the pot returns to a boil the eggs will scramble into threads.
- Seasoning"Let each person season to taste" would have meant pepper above all; cayenne or a spoonful of sherry were period additions sometimes made at the table. Salt lightly in the pot, since clam liquor is already saline.
The Dixie Cook Book belongs to the family of large subscription-sold American compilations of the 1880s, assembled from contributed household receipts and padded out with reference matter; despite the title, its soup chapter draws freely on Northern and coastal cooking. Cracker-thickened clam and oyster soups were common in American cookbooks of the period: broken hard crackers were cheap, shelf-stable, and did the work of both thickener and starch course. The instruction to pickle the cooked clams rather than eat them in the soup fits a thrifty logic in which one operation was expected to produce two dishes.