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Small Clam Patties
Prepare and keep hot six patties. Place thirty-six freshly opened little neck clams in a small saucepan, with their own liquor, half pint water, two branches celery, two branches parsley and a saltspoon cayenne pepper, and boil for six minutes. Remove the celery and parsley, strain the broth into a bowl and keep the clams on a plate. Wipe the saucepan in which the clams were boiled, place in a half ounce melted butter and one ounce flour, set on the fire and stir with a wooden spoon while heating for two minutes, then pour in one gill clam broth, one gill milk, one gill cream, two saltspoons salt, half saltspoon cayenne pepper and one saltspoon grated nutmeg; constantly mix with the spoon until it comes to a boiling point, then add the clams, mix a little and cook for five minutes more. Dilute one egg yolk with two tablespoons cold cream, add the clams and mix while heating for two minutes more. Remove, dress the patties on a large dish, evenly divide the clams into them, place the covers on and serve very hot.
A creamed clam filling for pastry cases, written in the terse professional style of a hotel kitchen. Two things need attention: the units, and how long the clams stay on the heat.
- The hinge: the egg liaisonOnce the yolk and cream go in, the sauce must not reach a boil or it will curdle into grains. Keep it below a simmer and stir until it just thickens, about a minute rather than two.
- Clam timingBetween the six-minute boil, five minutes in the sauce and two more with the yolk, the clams cook for about thirteen minutes and are likely to turn rubbery. Cook them in the broth only until they firm and the edges curl, a minute or two, then hold them aside and return them to the finished sauce at the very end to warm through.
- GillA gill is half a cup, 4 fl oz. So the sauce takes 1/2 cup clam broth, 1/2 cup milk and 1/2 cup cream.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a scant 1/4 teaspoon. The recipe calls for one and a half saltspoons of cayenne in all (one in the broth, half in the sauce), roughly 3/8 teaspoon, which some will still find aggressive by current taste.
- Salt and the brothLittleneck liquor is already salty, though here it is diluted with half a pint of water. Taste the sauce before adding the half teaspoon of salt (two saltspoons) the recipe specifies.
- Patties"Patties" here means baked puff-pastry shells with lids, what a French kitchen calls bouchées or vol-au-vent cases. Frozen puff pastry shells work; bake and keep them warm and dry, and fill only at the moment of serving so the bottoms stay crisp.
- Butter and flourHalf an ounce of butter to one ounce of flour is a lean, flour-heavy roux, about 1 tablespoon butter to 3 1/2 tablespoons flour. Equal weights give a smoother sauce; if you follow the original, cook it the full two minutes to lose the raw taste.
- ClamsThirty-six littlenecks is three dozen small hard-shell clams, something like 4 to 5 lb in the shell depending on grade. Scrub them, and open over a bowl so none of the liquor is lost; strain it through a fine sieve or cloth to catch grit.
- YieldSix filled shells: a first course for six, or a lunch for three.
Filippini's International Cook Book (1906) came out of Delmonico's in New York, and this is a restaurant dish through and through: shells baked in advance, filling built in a single saucepan, served "very hot" the moment it is spooned in. Littleneck clams are among the smallest market grades of the Atlantic hard clam, Mercenaria mercenaria, and the name is generally traced to Little Neck Bay on the north shore of Long Island, which supplied the New York trade. Creamed shellfish in pastry cases was one of the standard ways a turn-of-the-century American kitchen dressed up local seafood for a formal menu, alongside lobster Newburg and creamed oysters; the egg-yolk-and-cream liaison at the end is the same finish those dishes use, borrowed from French sauce practice.