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Soft Clams, Bourguignonne
Open thirty-six medium soft clams, remove all sandy parts, keeping nothing but perfect bodies, and keep on half shells until required. Place in a mortar three peeled shallots, half a bean garlic, two branches parsley and one branch chervil and pound to a fine pulp; add one ounce hard butter and thoroughly pound until well amalgamated, then press through a sieve into a bowl; add four tablespoons bread crumbs; mix well with spoon and evenly spread this butter over the clams; arrange on a tine, set in oven to bake five minutes. Remove, arrange on a dish; pour the butter from pan over clams, decorate with six quarters lemon and a little parsley greens and serve.
This is snail butter — the garlic-shallot-parsley compound served on escargots à la bourguignonne — transferred to soft clams on the half shell. Everything depends on getting the butter well amalgamated and the clams out of the oven fast.
- The clamsSoft clams are steamers (Mya arenaria), not littlenecks. Shucked raw they are awkward: the dark siphon skin should be peeled off and the sandy stomach discarded, which is what "keeping nothing but perfect bodies" means. Thirty-six clams serves six as an appetizer.
- Half a bean garlic"Bean" in period usage means a small piece of garlic, roughly a clove or less, so this is half of that for thirty-six clams. It is a very small amount by modern habit; the shallots carry most of the aroma. Add more garlic if you want it forward.
- One ounce of butter is not enoughTwo tablespoons of butter will not spread over three dozen clams once four tablespoons of crumbs are worked in. Count on 4 oz (one stick) if you want a proper cap on each shell; the herb and shallot quantities scale up with it.
- Mortar, sieve, or processorThe pounding and sieving exist to break the shallot and garlic down so no raw fibre survives a five-minute bake. A food processor does the same job — pulse the aromatics to a paste first, then add cold butter and crumbs.
- "A tine"A misprint for a tin — a shallow baking pan. Steady the shells in coarse salt or crumpled foil so the butter does not run out before it melts into the clam.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. Five minutes implies a hot oven; around 450F works. The clams are already tender raw and need only to heat through and brown the crumb butter, and longer cooking shrinks and toughens them. A minute under the broiler at the end colors the tops.
- ChervilRarely stocked fresh. Use a little tarragon plus extra parsley rather than dried chervil, which has almost no flavor.
- SourcingSoft clams gape; they cannot close tightly, so judge them by the siphon, which should twitch or retract when touched. Use them the day you get them. Raw-shucked clams are cooked here only briefly, so freshness matters more than usual.
Alexander Filippini, long of Delmonico's, included in The International Cook Book a clean example of European technique applied to American ingredients: the butter is the classic beurre bourguignonne of escargots — shallot, garlic, parsley, butter, crumbs — laid over the soft clams that were then dug by the barrel along the Atlantic coast from New Jersey to Maine. Steamers were more often served simply, boiled in their own liquor and dipped in broth and melted butter; putting them on the half shell under a Burgundian herb butter was the sort of substitution that let a hotel kitchen sell a humble shellfish at restaurant prices. The same butter turns up in this period on oysters, mussels and mushrooms, and the general trick — snail butter without snails — recurs in later baked clam dishes.