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Curried Soft Clams
Prepare a curry sauce and keep it hot. Have thirty-six freshly opened soft clams, thoroughly clean them, carefully removing all sandy parts and keeping nothing but the perfect bodies. Plunge them in a pint of boiling water with a teaspoon salt for one minute; drain on a sieve and add to the prepared curry sauce; gently mix and let boil on the range for one minute. Remove, pour into a hot, deep dish and serve.
A very short recipe that depends almost entirely on restraint: the clams are in hot liquid for a total of two minutes, and that is deliberate. The curry sauce is assumed to be made from another entry in the book.
- The hinge: two minutes totalOne minute in boiling salted water, one minute in the sauce. Soft clams tighten into rubber bands with any more heat, so have the sauce hot and the serving dish warmed before the clams go near the water.
- What "soft clams" meansSoft-shell clams, Mya arenaria — steamers, longnecks, or piss clams on the New England coast. Not littlenecks or cherrystones, which are hard-shell and would want different handling. Thirty-six shucked steamers is roughly 1 to 1 1/4 lb of meat.
- "Removing all sandy parts"On a soft clam this means slipping off the tough black sheath covering the siphon and cutting away the dark stomach mass; what remains is the belly and neck meat. Steamers are notoriously gritty, so rinse the shucked meats in several changes of cold water as well.
- The curry sauceThe book gives a curry sauce elsewhere; period versions are generally a butter-and-flour sauce loosened with stock and seasoned with curry powder. If you use a modern blend, bloom it in the butter before the flour so it does not taste raw.
- "Let boil on the range"The range is the stovetop, and the boil is a formality — bring the sauce back to a bare simmer only. A hard boil will both break a flour-thickened sauce and toughen the clams.
- The blanching waterA pint of water with a teaspoon of salt is only lightly salted, well below seawater strength. The drained liquid is worth saving; a spoonful or two strained back into the sauce adds seasoning.
- Yield and serviceThe recipe gives no yield; thirty-six clams would stretch to perhaps four to six depending on the course. The text directs that it be poured into a hot, deep dish.
Alexander Filippini, long a chef at Delmonico's in New York, built The International Cook Book (1906) as a survey of everything a well-read American kitchen might attempt, and it routinely marries a local ingredient to a foreign sauce. That is exactly what happens here: soft-shell clams were among the cheapest and most abundant shellfish on the Atlantic seaboard, dug by the bushel and usually just steamed, while curry reached American tables through British Anglo-Indian cookery, where a spiced flour-thickened sauce over rice had been standard for a century. Curried oysters, lobster and shrimp all appear in books of the period; curried clams are the frugal New England cousin of the same idea. The one-minute cooking is worth noting.