Home › The World's Kitchen › Patties of Soft Clams
Patties of Soft Clams
Prepare and keep hot six small patties. Remove all sandy parts, keeping nothing but the perfect bodies of thirty-six good-sized soft clams, plunge in a quart boiling water with teaspoon salt for two minutes and drain on a sieve. Mix in saucepan one ounce butter with one and a half ounces flour, heat well, then moisten with a half gill milk and gill cream. Season with a teaspoon salt, saltspoon each cayenne and grated nutmeg and pour in two tablespoons sherry. Sharply mix until it comes to a boil, then add clams, gently mix and cook for one minute. Dress patties on a hot dish, evenly divide clams into patties, sprinkle a little freshly chopped parsley over, place covers on and serve.
A late-Victorian restaurant dish: blanched soft-shell clams bound in a very thick, sherried cream sauce and spooned into baked pastry shells. Two things decide whether it works — how carefully the clams are cleaned, and how briefly they are cooked.
- "Patties" are pastry shellsThese are vol-au-vent or patty shells — small rounds of puff pastry with a lid, baked hollow and kept warm. Frozen puff-pastry shells are the practical substitute; bake them ahead and hold them in a 250F oven so they are hot when filled.
- Cleaning the clams is the real workSoft-shell clams (steamers, Ipswich clams) have a dark siphon sheath and a gritty stomach. Slip the papery skin off the neck and discard the belly; "perfect bodies" means you keep only the firm white muscle and neck. Rinse in several changes of water and check for sand between changes.
- Do not extend the cookingTwo minutes in the boiling salted water and one minute in the sauce is the whole cooking time, and it is deliberate. Soft clams tighten into rubber within a few minutes of extra heat; hold the final cooking to the one minute the recipe allows and serve immediately.
- Gills and saltspoonsA gill is half a cup, so the sauce takes 1/4 cup milk and 1/2 cup cream. A saltspoon is about 1/4 teaspoon — so a scant quarter teaspoon each of cayenne and nutmeg, which is assertive but intentional.
- Weights for the rouxOne ounce butter is 2 tablespoons; 1.5 ounces flour is about 1/3 cup. Against only 3/4 cup of liquid this makes a paste rather than a pouring sauce, which is correct — it has to hold in pastry without soaking the base. Cook the flour and butter a minute or two before adding liquid, or the filling will taste raw.
- SaltA teaspoon of salt in the blanching water plus another teaspoon in three-quarters of a cup of sauce is a great deal, and the clams themselves are saline. Season the sauce lightly and correct it after the clams go in.
- The sherryTwo tablespoons of sherry go in after the seasonings and before the sauce is brought to a boil. Use a dry amontillado or fino rather than anything labelled cooking sherry, which is salted.
- YieldSix filled shells, about thirty-six clams — a first course for six, or lunch for three with a salad.
Soft-shell clams were an everyday Atlantic-coast food that nineteenth-century hotel and club kitchens learned to dress up, and this is what that looks like: a cheap bivalve raised to the dignity of a puff-pastry case with cream, nutmeg and sherry, in the manner French chefs applied to oysters and sweetbreads. Serving a rich bound ragout inside a baked shell — the vol-au-vent, or in American menu English simply a "patty" — was a standard device for turning a small quantity of expensive-tasting filling into a plated course, and it appears constantly in banquet menus of the 1880s and 1890s. The terse telegraphic phrasing here — no headnote, weights in ounces, liquids in gills — is the voice of a professional kitchen writing for someone assumed to have made a roux before.