Home › The World's Kitchen › Little Neck Clams
Little Neck Clams
Little neck clams should always be thoroughly cold before they are opened, and never open them except about the time of sending to table, so as to retain both juice and sweet flavour.
Cover six deep plates with finely shaved ice; neatly arrange six clams on each plate and serve with a quarter of a sound lemon on each plate.
This is a service recipe rather than a cooking one: nothing is heated, so everything depends on the clams themselves and on the timing of the shucking. Six points cover what the original assumes you already know.
- What a littleneck isA littleneck is one of the smallest market sizes of the hard clam, Mercenaria mercenaria, roughly 1.5 to 2 inches across and about 7-10 to the pound; smaller "countnecks" are also sold. The name is generally traced to Little Neck Bay on Long Island rather than to the clam's anatomy. Cherrystones are the next size up and are larger than a comfortable single bite off the shell.
- The hinge: open at the last minuteThe instruction to open them only "about the time of sending to table" is the whole recipe. A shucked clam begins losing its liquor and its saline sweetness within minutes, and the flesh slackens. Shuck to order, or at most a few minutes ahead with the plates already iced.
- Cold means very coldChill the clams thoroughly first — 30 minutes buried in ice, or several hours in the coldest part of the refrigerator. Cold shells are firmer, the adductor muscles release more cleanly from the shell, and the clam is less inclined to clamp shut against the knife.
- Sourcing and live clamsBuy from a dealer who can show the shellfish tag with the harvest date and water body; that tag is the only real assurance about the water they came from. Use only clams that are tightly shut or that close when tapped, and discard any that gape, smell of anything but the sea, or have cracked shells. Anyone pregnant, immunocompromised, or with liver disease should not eat raw shellfish at all.
- "Finely shaved ice"Crushed ice works but melts fast and lets the shells tilt and spill their liquor. Pack the ice level and press a shallow socket for each shell so it sits flat. Salt mixed through the ice makes the mixture colder, though it also makes the ice melt faster.
- Yield and accompanimentsSix plates of six clams — a modest first course by the standards of the period, and now closer to a light appetizer for six. "A sound lemon" simply means an unblemished, juicy one. The book offers nothing else; mignonette, or cocktail sauce and oyster crackers, would not be out of place.
Little Neck Bay, on the north shore of Long Island near Douglaston, is generally credited with giving its name to the smallest grade of hard clam sometime in the mid-nineteenth century, and by the later nineteenth century "little necks" appeared commonly on New York hotel and steamship menus as an opening course before soup, in much the slot the oyster occupied in cooler months. That a cookbook of the period devotes a paragraph to arranging six of them on shaved ice with a lemon quarter says something about how formalized the raw-bar course had become: the technique required no cooking at all, only correct temperature, correct timing and correct presentation. The insistence on shucking at the last moment reflects a genuine constraint of the era's kitchens, where refrigeration was ice-based and a shucked clam left standing would warm and go flat quickly.