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Fried Soft Clams
Procure thirty-six good-sized, fine, fresh, soft clams, without the shells. Discard all stringy and sandy parts, keeping nothing but the perfect bodies. Place them on a plate; season with a teaspoon salt, half teaspoon paprika; mix well in the seasoning, lightly roll I flour, then dip lightly in beaten egg and lastly in bread crumbs. Plunge in boiling fat and fry for five minutes. Lift up with a skimmer, thoroughly drain, sprinkle a teaspoon salt over them evenly. Dress on a hot dish; arrange six thin slices boiled bacon over them, decorate the dish with six quarters of lemon and serve.
A straightforward breaded fry, but the timing is the thing that will ruin it. Everything else is a matter of translating early-1900s restaurant shorthand.
- Five minutes is far too longShucked soft clams are cooked through in 60 to 90 seconds in fat at 375F, two minutes at the outside for very large ones. Five minutes turns the bellies to paste and the siphons to rubber. Fry until the crumbs are deep gold and lift them out.
- Fat temperature"Boiling fat" means roughly 365-375F. Below that the crumb coating soaks; above 385F the crust colors before the clam heats through. Fry in small batches so the temperature holds.
- What to discardThe "stringy and sandy parts" are the tough black sheath over the siphon, which peels off with your fingers, and the dark stomach mass if it is gritty. The belly itself is the point of the dish and should stay.
- Buying themSoft-shell clams (steamers, Mya arenaria) are sold live in the shell or already shucked at good fish counters. Thirty-six large ones is about a quart of shucked meats. If you shuck your own, a brief steam opens them and makes the siphon skin easy to strip.
- Salt twice is once too manyA teaspoon of salt on the clams before breading and another teaspoon after frying is heavy by current taste, especially with bacon alongside. Season lightly before, then finish with a pinch.
- "Boiled bacon"Bacon of the period was saltier, and some period cookery does call for parboiling it before broiling, though how usual that was is not clear. Modern bacon needs no such treatment; cook it crisp and lay it over the clams as directed.
- DrainingA skimmer or spider, then a rack rather than a solid plate. Clams sitting in their own steam lose the crust within a minute.
- YieldThirty-six clams with six slices of bacon and six lemon quarters is plainly built for six people as a first course, or three or four as a main with fried potatoes.
Soft-shell clams have been dug on the tidal flats of the northeastern United States since long before European settlement, and steamed clams were everyday food along that coast well into the nineteenth century. Frying them whole, belly and all, in a flour-egg-crumb coating is a later and more genteel treatment: it turns a shore-shack food into something a hotel dining room could plate with lemon quarters and a strip of bacon, which is exactly the register this book works in. The roadside fried clam as Americans now know it, dipped in evaporated milk and corn flour, is generally traced to Essex, Massachusetts, in the 1910s; the breaded version here belongs to the older restaurant tradition that ran alongside it.