Run some silver skewers through the soft clams, alternating each piece with a three-quarters of an inch square of lean, unsmoked bacon; dip the whole into melted butter, and roll them in bread-crumbs, broil them over a slow fire, and when done dress on a hot dish and cover with maitre-d'hotel butter (No. 581). They may be prepared exactly the same only omitting the bread-crumbs.
A four-line recipe from Delmonico's kitchen that depends almost entirely on restraint at the fire. Soft clams are cooked through the moment they are hot; everything else here is assembly.
The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's record of thirty-odd years as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and it is a book written in two languages at once: an American ingredient given a French title, numbered for cross-reference like a catalogue. Soft-shell clams were a cheap, abundant East Coast shellfish, dug on tidal flats and eaten by the bucket at shore dinners, and the French dress here is exactly the kind of translation Delmonico's traded on — a steamer clam becomes lucine papillon, skewered on silver, and sold at restaurant prices. Cooking small morsels in alternation with pork fat on a skewer is much older than the book and appears across European grill cookery under names like en brochette and en hatelet; the fat is there to baste something lean that would otherwise dry out. The ornamental silver hatelet itself belonged to the high service of the period, when a garnish might be arranged on a skewer purely to be looked at, and it disappeared from kitchens along with the elaborate plated presentations it existed to prop up.