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Little Neck Clams, Bordelaise
Open forty-eight fresh little neck clams, and keep detached on the half shell. Lay them on a tin, finely chop together four shallots, a half bean garlic and two branches parsley, evenly divide this hash on the clams, pour a half teaspoon claret and arrange a thin piece lean raw bacon over each. Sprinkle a tablespoon grated Parmesan cheese over, then set in the oven for fifteen minutes, remove, dress on a dish, pour gravy from pan over and serve.
A raw-bar dish sent to the oven: shucked clams on the half shell under shallot, wine, bacon and cheese. The original omits the oven temperature, which is the one thing worth pinning down.
- Oven heatThe recipe gives no temperature. A hot oven, around 450F, suits the purpose: crisping the bacon and glazing the topping before the clams tighten. At a moderate 350F the fifteen minutes would likely overcook them.
- Fifteen minutes is the outer limitLittlenecks are small and cook in well under ten minutes once opened. Pull them when the bacon has rendered and the edges of the clams have just firmed; longer and they turn to erasers.
- "A half bean garlic"A "bean" of garlic in books of this period is generally understood as a clove, or a piece about that size. Either way, half of one for forty-eight clams is a whisper of garlic; one small clove, minced with the shallots and parsley, is closer to what a modern palate reads as "bordelaise."
- ClaretNineteenth-century English and American usage for red Bordeaux. Any dry, unoaked red works. Half a teaspoon per clam is right; more and the wine pools in the shell and boils rather than perfumes.
- The baconIt must be sliced thin and cut to the size of the clam, so it renders in the time given. Thick-cut supermarket bacon will still be flabby when the clams are done; if that is all you have, part-cook it first and lay it on.
- Cheese quantityOne tablespoon of Parmesan spread over four dozen clams is a dusting, not a crust. Whether that restraint is intentional or simply the book's brevity is not clear; taste and judge for yourself.
- Keeping the shells upright"Lay them on a tin" works better over a half-inch bed of coarse salt or crumpled foil, which steadies the shells so the wine and juices stay in them and end up as the pan gravy poured over at the end.
- YieldForty-eight clams serves six to eight as a first course, or four as a light main with bread to mop the pan liquor.
- Buying and shuckingBuy live clams with tightly closed shells and discard any that gape and will not shut when tapped. Shuck over a bowl and add the liquor to the pan rather than losing it.
Littleneck clams take their name from Little Neck Bay, on the north shore of Long Island, whose beds supplied the New York market; the name attached itself to the smallest size grade of the hard clam Mercenaria mercenaria and stuck long after the local fishery ceased to matter. "Bordelaise" in a book of this vintage rarely means the classic red-wine-and-marrow sauce of the restaurant repertoire — it signals the Bordeaux flavor base of shallot, garlic, parsley and red wine, which is why a few drops of claret and a chopped hash of aromatics are enough to earn the title. The dish appears to belong to the era when American hotel kitchens were often run by French-trained chefs applying continental garnishes to whatever the local waters produced, and the pairing of shellfish with bacon and grated cheese under a hot oven may well have been a familiar way of turning a cheap, abundant bivalve into something that could be written on a printed menu in French.