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Soft Clams, Boniface
Carefully open thirty-six medium, fresh soft clams, remove all sandy parts, keeping nothing but the perfect bodies. Neatly clean thirty-six half shells, place one clam in each half shell and lay in a tin. Heat two tablespoons melted butter in a small saucepan, add four chopped branches celery and gently cook ten minutes. Then add two tablespoons flour, stir well while heating one minute, then pour in two gills milk and briskly mix until it comes to a boil; add half teaspoons salt, saltspoon cayenne pepper, one egg yolk and two tablespoons grated Parmesan cheese. Sharply mix while cooking two minutes, then with a teaspoon evenly pour the sauce over the clams. Sprinkle a little grated parmesan cheese over, divide an anchovy butter over the sauce, set in oven fifteen minutes. Remove, squeeze juice of half a sound lemon over. Dress on a dish with a little parsley greens and serve.
A late-Victorian clam gratin: béchamel enriched with egg yolk and Parmesan, spooned back into the shells and browned. The measurements are the era's, and the oven time is the one thing to ignore.
- The hinge: heat the sauce, not the clamsFifteen minutes in the oven turns soft clams into erasers. The sauce is already cooked, so the shells need only long enough to glaze and brown — five to seven minutes under a hot broiler, or eight minutes at 450F, watching for the cheese to colour.
- Gills and saltspoonsTwo gills is one cup of milk. A saltspoon is about 1/4 teaspoon, so a very small pinch of cayenne. "Half teaspoons salt" is almost certainly a typesetting slip for half a teaspoon; salt to taste at the end, since Parmesan and anchovy butter both bring their own.
- Branches of celeryFour ribs from the stalk, not four whole heads. Chop fine and sweat in the butter without colouring; ten minutes is right for softening them before the flour goes in.
- Soft clams and their shellsThese are Mya arenaria — steamers, longnecks — and the dark siphon skin is the "sandy part" to strip along with the stomach. Their shells are thin and prone to snapping; scrubbed scallop shells or small gratin dishes hold the sauce better, or use littlenecks on the half shell instead.
- The tinA shallow sheet pan. Bed the shells in a layer of coarse salt or crumpled foil so they sit level and the sauce does not run out.
- Anchovy butterNo longer a shop item in most places. Mash two or three oil-packed anchovy fillets into three tablespoons softened butter; dot a small amount over each shell, since it is salty and assertive.
- Egg yolk techniqueAdd the yolk off the direct heat and stir hard. The text calls for sharp mixing but keeps the pan on the fire; those two further minutes of cooking should be gentle — a rolling boil after the yolk goes in will scramble it and break the sauce.
- YieldThirty-six shells serve six as a first course, or four as a light supper. Assemble ahead and refrigerate, but bring back nearly to room temperature before browning.
Filippini's International Cook Book (1906) is full of dishes tagged with a proper name, and "Boniface" is one of the oldest jokes in the trade: since Farquhar's play The Beaux' Stratagem (1707), Boniface has been the stock name for a jovial innkeeper, and by the nineteenth century American hotelmen were routinely called "the genial Boniface" in the press. Whether the tag honoured a particular man or simply saluted hotel cooking, the record does not say. The dish itself belongs to the great age of the American clam on the half shell, when soft clams — steamers, dug from tidal flats from Maine to the Chesapeake — were cheap enough to serve three dozen at a time, and when a gratin finished with Parmesan and anchovy butter marked a kitchen as continental. Filippini spent decades at Delmonico's in New York, and the recipe reads exactly like something built to come out of the oven and go to a table in minutes.