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Minced Clams Au Gratin
Open forty-eight medium, fresh clams and place in a saucepan with their own liquor and one pint water, then boil five minutes. Drain on a sieve and finely slice them. Mix in a small saucepan one ounce butter with two ounces flour and heat half a minute, then pour in two gills hot milk, sharply mix with a whisk until it comes to a boil and boil five minutes. Add the clams, with two saltspoons salt, one saltspoon cayenne and one saltspoon grated nutmeg. Mix well and let cook five minutes. Pour the clams in a baking dish, sprinkle a little grated Parmesan cheese over, divide half an ounce of butter in little bits on top, set in the oven ten minutes. Remove, and serve.
A clam bechamel run under heat with Parmesan — straightforward once the old measures are converted. The main thing to watch is how long the clams cook.
- Gills and saltspoonsA gill is half a cup, so two gills of hot milk is one cup. A saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon: two saltspoons salt is 1/2 tsp, and the cayenne and nutmeg are 1/4 tsp each — the cayenne in particular is assertive at that level.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given; the instruction is simply to set the dish in the oven for ten minutes. Since everything is already cooked, the ten minutes is only to heat through and colour the top, so a hot oven (somewhere around 400-425F) or a few minutes under the broiler will do the job.
- The clamsForty-eight medium clams, most likely hard-shell (littlenecks or cherrystones) given Filippini's New York kitchen, though the recipe does not say. Reckon on roughly 2 to 2 1/2 cups of chopped meat. Canned chopped clams to about that volume, drained with their juice reserved and used in place of the cooking liquor, will stand in without embarrassment.
- Don't cook them three timesAs written the clams are boiled five minutes, simmered five more in the sauce, then baked ten. That is the hinge: clam muscle tightens fast. Open them just until the shells gape, add the chopped meat to the finished sauce off the heat, and let the oven do the rest.
- The roux is deliberately stiffOne ounce butter to two ounces flour is a flour-heavy roux, and one cup of milk on top of it gives a paste rather than a pouring sauce. Whether or not that was the intention, it suits a gratin that needs to hold its shape, and the clam liquor clinging to the meat loosens it. Thin with reserved clam broth if it seizes.
- Reserve the cooking liquorThe pint of water dilutes some very good broth. Strain it through cloth to catch grit, then reduce it hard and use it to slacken the sauce instead of discarding it.
- YieldEnough for four as a main course or six to eight as a first course. Individual ramekins or scallop shells brown better and faster than one deep dish.
Alexander Filippini spent decades in the kitchens of Delmonico's in New York, and The International Cook Book (1906) reflects a chef's-eye view of American ingredients handled by French method — here a straight bechamel gratin applied to the hard-shell clam, which was cheap and abundant along the Atlantic seaboard. Au gratin means only that the surface is crusted under heat; the cheese is a convention rather than a requirement, and the Parmesan here gives the dish its faintly Italian cast. The grated nutmeg points to classical training: nutmeg in a white sauce was a standard seasoning in French professional practice.