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Clam Stew with Celery (Cut a well-cleaned white)
Cut a well-cleaned white celery stalk in small dice pieces and place in a saucepan with a quart and a half water, half a teaspoon salt, and let boil forty minutes. Then add forty-eight little neck clams with their liquor, season with two saltspoons cayenne pepper and boil ten minutes. Pour in a pint and a half hot milk, half gill cream and one ounce good butter; mix well, and as soon as it comes to a boil skim off the scum, pour in a soup tureen and serve with a plate of oysterettes.
CHICKEN (OR TURKEY) HASH, MORENO AU GRATIN Pick off all the meat from the turkey left over from yesterday and cut into small dice pieces. Cut also two boiled cold potatoes and four Spanish sweet peppers same way. Mix in a frying pan a tablespoon butter with one and a half tablespoons flour and heat for half minute, then pour in two gills hot milk. Mix with a wooden spoon until it comes to a boil, add the chicken, potatoes and peppers, season with half teaspoon salt, a saltspoon paprika and a saltspoon grated nutmeg; lightly mix and let cook ten minutes, occasionally mixing meanwhile, then add half gill cream and half ounce good butter. Mix well, pour into a baking dish, sprinkle two tablespoons grated Parmesan cheese over, arrange a few little bits of butter on top, set in oven fifteen minutes, remove and serve.
Two dishes run together on one page: a clam and celery chowder, and a gratin for the day after a roast bird. Both come from a book written as a day-by-day menu plan, which is why the hash simply assumes yesterday's turkey.
- Do not boil the clams ten minutesLittlenecks are done in two to three minutes, and after that they tighten into rubber. Add the shucked clams and their liquor at the very end, off a hard boil, and give them only long enough to firm up.
- And do not boil the milkClam liquor is acidic and salty, and a rolling boil with milk in the pot invites curdling. Bring the milk and cream in over low heat and hold the stew just below a simmer.
- Old measuresA gill is half a cup, so half a gill of cream is 4 tablespoons; two gills of milk in the hash is 1 cup. A saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, which makes half a teaspoon of cayenne in the stew and a quarter teaspoon each of paprika and nutmeg in the hash.
- Forty-eight littlenecksThat is somewhere around 5 pounds or more of clams in the shell, depending on their size, yielding perhaps a couple of cups of shucked meats with their liquor. Buy them closed and heavy, and strain the liquor through a fine sieve to catch grit.
- The celeryForty minutes in a quart and a half of water is not a cooking time so much as a broth-making time; the diced celery will collapse and the water reduces to a flavoured base. Expect the finished stew to be thin and brothy rather than a thickened chowder.
- Spanish sweet peppersProbably pimientos, which were sold canned or jarred, already roasted and peeled, though fresh sweet peppers are also possible. Four of them is roughly a cup, diced; roasted red peppers substitute directly.
- Oven for the gratinThe original gives none. Use 400F for fifteen minutes, on a shelf near the top, so the Parmesan browns before the sauce dries out.
- YieldThe stew serves six to eight as a first course. The hash serves three or four, depending on how much bird was left.
Alexander Filippini, long a chef at Delmonico's in New York, is credited with The International Cook Book (1906); his books are organised around calendars of daily menus, which is why the gratin's first instruction is to pick over the turkey "left over from yesterday." Littleneck clams are generally said to take their name from Little Neck Bay on the north shore of Long Island, and by the 1900s the term had spread to mean any small hard-shell clam of that size, whatever the water it came from. The "oysterettes" served alongside are the small soup crackers that American cooks still call oyster crackers; Oysterettes was also a commercial brand name for them.