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Clam Broth
Open fifteen large, fresh clams and place them in a small saucepan with all their liquor. Add one and a half quarts cold water and four branches celery. Place on the fire, season with two saltspoons cayenne pepper, adding one teaspoon butter, and let boil for ten minutes. Strain through a napkin into six cups and serve.
A clear clam broth of the sort once poured at oyster bars and sickrooms alike. The whole dish depends on the clam liquor, so the handling of the raw clams matters more than anything on the stove.
- Which clams"Large" here most likely means hard-shell clams (quahogs), the big chowder clams, rather than littlenecks or steamers; the recipe does not specify. Fifteen of them should give something on the order of a cup of liquor, which is the backbone of the broth.
- Purge and scrub firstHold the clams in cold salted water for an hour so they expel sand, then scrub the shells before shucking. Grit that gets into the liquor cannot be strained out of it entirely, and the recipe gives you no second chance.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so two of them is a half teaspoon of cayenne across six cups. That is assertive by modern taste; a quarter teaspoon is closer to what most people want, and it can be corrected at the table.
- No added saltThe recipe calls for none. Clam liquor is already saline, and ten minutes at a boil concentrates it further. Taste before you reach for the salt cellar.
- Branches of celeryRead this as four ribs from the head, leaves included, since the leaves are aromatic. Split them lengthwise so they give up their flavour in ten minutes.
- Straining through a napkinA clean linen napkin wrung out in cold water, or a double layer of damp cheesecloth in a sieve. The damp cloth catches the fine sand that a metal strainer passes straight through.
- The clams themselvesTen minutes at a boil leaves them rubbery. The recipe strains them out without saying what becomes of them; if you would rather not waste them, chop them fine and use them in a chowder or a stuffing where texture matters less.
- YieldSix cups, as stated, which the recipe pours out as six servings.
This comes from Alexander Filippini, long a chef at Delmonico's in New York, and it reflects a moment when clam broth was both restaurant food and something close to medicine. Hot clam broth was sold by the cup at oyster saloons and hotel bars in the northeastern United States around the turn of the twentieth century — a savoury alternative to beef tea — and it was routinely prescribed for invalids and convalescents on the theory that it was nourishing without taxing the stomach. The formula seems to show that double life, with the cayenne and butter on one side and the clear straining and the absence of thickening on the other, though the division is a matter of interpretation rather than record.