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Clams En Coquilles, Philadelphia
Plunge forty-eight small clams in boiling water, boil three minutes and drain on a sieve. Place in a saucepan six finely chopped shallots, half a chopped green pepper, a small stalk celery cut in small squares, and two ounces raw ham also cut in small pieces, with one ounce butter, and gently cook ten minutes, occasionally stirring meanwhile. Add two ounces flour, stir briskly while heating one minute, pour in two gills milk, one gill cream, half teaspoon salt, two saltspoons cayenne pepper and saltspoon grated nutmeg. Mix well until it comes to a boil, then boil fifteen minutes. Add clams with half teaspoon chopped chives, mix a little, cook one minute. Divide clams, etc., in six table shells, place in a tin, sprinkle a little grated Parmesan cheese over, arrange a few little bits butter on top, set in oven ten minutes, remove and serve.
A rich clam gratin built on a thick, spiced velouté. The original assumes a professional larder and a coal range, so a few numbers need translating.
- The hinge: don't cook the clams twiceThree minutes in boiling water is enough to open small clams and set them; after that they only toughen. Once they go back into the sauce they need the barest warming through, and the ten minutes in the oven is really for browning the cheese, not cooking the shellfish.
- Gills and saltspoonsA gill is half a cup, so two gills milk is 1 cup and one gill cream is 1/2 cup. A saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, making the cayenne about 1/2 teaspoon and the nutmeg 1/4 teaspoon.
- The heat levelHalf a teaspoon of cayenne across six portions is assertive by modern standards. Start with half and taste.
- Oven temperatureNone is given because the recipe only wants a gratin surface. Around 425F for ten minutes will brown the Parmesan and butter without drying the filling; a brief pass under the broiler finishes it faster.
- "Raw ham"Most likely uncooked ham, cured but not boiled or baked, rather than fresh pork. Two ounces, finely diced, is there for salt and depth.
- The roux is very thickTwo ounces of flour to a cup and a half of dairy gives a paste, not a sauce, and that is deliberate: it has to hold the clams in an open shell. The fifteen-minute boil is to cook out the raw flour taste, so keep it at a bare simmer and stir, or it will scorch on a modern thin-bottomed pan.
- Clams and shellsForty-eight small clams means littlenecks or similar; count on 8 per serving. "Table shells" are shells used for serving at table; 6-oz ramekins or the cleaned clam shells themselves work.
- YieldSix shells, served hot as a first course.
The International Cook Book came out of the world of the great American hotel and restaurant kitchens, where dishes were routinely tagged with a place name to distinguish one treatment of a standard preparation from another. En coquille is simply French for "in the shell," a service style applied to everything from oysters to sweetbreads; what the Philadelphia label refers to here is not recorded. Philadelphia also sat at the center of a large Delaware Bay and Jersey shore shellfish trade, and small hard clams were relatively cheap in the period. The heavy flour-bound sauce is characteristic of the era's gratins, which had to survive a trip from a hot kitchen to a dining room without weeping.