Home › The World's Kitchen › Clam Sauce
Clam Sauce
Plunge twenty-four freshly opened little neck clams in half gill boiling water and boil three minutes. Thoroughly drain them, keeping the liquor. Mix in a saucepan one and a half tablespoons melted butter, two tablespoons flour, and heat half minute. Pour in half gill milk and half gill cream, mix well until it comes to a boil. Add the clams. Season with three saltspoons salt and saltspoon cayenne pepper, lightly mix and let boil five minutes, add the liquor of clams, dilute an egg yolk in tablespoon cream and a few drops lemon juice, add to the sauce, and sharply mix while heating one minute. Remove and use as required.
A classic white sauce enriched with a yolk liaison, meant to be spooned over fish, poured into pastry shells, or tossed with pasta. The measurements are in gills and saltspoons, and the clam timings are far longer than modern practice allows.
- Half a gillA gill is half a cup, so half a gill is 1/4 cup (4 tablespoons). The recipe uses that quantity three times over: water for the clams, milk, and cream. The reserved clam liquor is added at the end with no measure given.
- SaltspoonsA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. Three saltspoons of salt is 3/4 teaspoon, and a saltspoon of cayenne is 1/4 teaspoon, which is assertive. Salt at the end instead, since clam liquor is already saline and its strength varies.
- Do not boil the clams twiceLittlenecks are done the moment they firm up. Three minutes in water and then a further five minutes boiling in the sauce will give you rubber. Steam or poach them barely a minute to release the liquor, chop them, and stir them into the finished sauce off the heat.
- The yolk liaisonThis is the hinge. Once the yolk goes in, the sauce must not reach a boil or it will curdle into scrambled egg. Temper the yolk with a spoonful of the hot sauce first, then return it and hold below a simmer for the minute called for.
- Cook the roux longerHalf a minute is barely enough to wet the flour. Give the butter and flour two to three minutes over low heat so the sauce does not taste pasty, then add the milk and cream gradually to avoid lumps.
- ClamsTwenty-four littlenecks, shucked, yield roughly a cup of meat and a good deal of liquor. Strain the liquor through a coffee filter or muslin; shucked clams can carry grit, and sand will ruin a cream sauce.
- YieldAbout a cup and a half of finished sauce, enough for four servings over baked or poached white fish, or for two as a pasta sauce.
The International Cook Book was compiled by Alexander Filippini, long the chef at Delmonico's in New York, and its sauce chapter is essentially French technique applied to whatever the American market offered. That is exactly what this is: a velouté or sauce suprême in structure, finished with the classic yolk-and-cream liaison, but built on littleneck clams rather than veal or fish stock. The littleneck takes its name from Little Neck Bay on the north shore of Long Island, a celebrated clamming ground in the nineteenth century, and by Filippini's day the word had spread to mean any small hard clam of that size regardless of where it was dug. Cream sauces of this kind are often said to have been a mainstay of hotel cookery around 1900, and the instruction to "use as required" tells you the book expects a cook who already knows what he is saucing.