Home › The World's Kitchen › Clam Fritters
Clam Fritters
Finely chop ten large, very fresh, freshly opened clams, place in a bowl with three ounces of flour, two fresh eggs, three tablespoons milk, a half teaspoon freshly chopped parsley, half teaspoon salt, three saltspoons white pepper and half teaspoon baking powder. Mix all well with a wooden spoon for five minutes. Heat three tablespoons lard in a large frying pan, and with a tablespoon drop in the batter to round-cake forms two inches in diameter; gently fry them for four minutes on each side, remove, drain on a cloth, dress on a hot dish, then proceed the same until the preparation is all used. Decorate the dish with a little parsley and serve.
A plain fritter batter that lives or dies on the clams themselves. The one thing to change is the frying time: four minutes a side in shallow fat will brown a two-inch fritter well past the point where the clam inside is still tender.
- The hinge: fry timeTwo to three minutes a side in fat at about 350-365F is enough for a two-inch fritter. The clams are chopped small and cook almost instantly; the extra minutes the original allows only toughen them and darken the crust.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so three saltspoons of white pepper is three-quarters of a teaspoon. That is assertive but correct for a seafood fritter of this style.
- Three ounces of flourWeight, not volume: roughly 2/3 cup of all-purpose flour. Weigh it if you can, since the batter should sit thick enough to hold a mound on the spoon rather than spread in the pan.
- The clamsTen large clams most likely means hard-shell quahogs or large cherrystones, giving a cup or more of chopped meat. Shucked clams from the fish counter work; drain them and chop by hand rather than in a processor, which turns them to paste.
- Clam liquorThe recipe says nothing about the liquid released on opening. Keep the batter as written and discard or save the liquor for chowder, or the mixture will thin out and refuse to hold shape.
- Lard and the panThree tablespoons of lard in a large frying pan is shallow frying, not deep. Any neutral oil with a decent smoke point substitutes directly; keep the fat topped up between batches, since the fritters absorb it.
- Draining"Drain on a cloth" means paper towels now, and only briefly. Hold finished fritters uncovered in a 250F oven while you fry the rest, so the crust does not steam soft.
- YieldThe recipe does not say, but tablespoon-dropped cakes from this quantity of batter should run to a dozen and a half or more, enough for four as a first course. Lemon or a plain tartar or mustard sauce suit it, though the original asks for nothing but parsley.
The International Cook Book was compiled by Alessandro Filippini, long associated with Delmonico's in New York, and it reflects the restaurant kitchen's habit of writing recipes as a single dense paragraph of quantities and timed steps. Clam fritters themselves are older and far humbler than that setting suggests: they belong to the Atlantic shore from Long Island up through New England, where hard clams were cheap, plentiful and dug by anyone with a rake, and chopping them into a batter stretched a small catch across a table. The insistence on clams "very fresh, freshly opened" reflects a period in which reliable refrigeration could not be assumed.