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Soft Clams En Brochette
Carefully open forty-eight fresh, medium, soft clams. Remove all sandy parts, keeping nothing but the perfect bodies, plunge in boiling water one minute and drain. Cut forty-eight thin three-quarter-inch-square pieces lean bacon, then arrange clams and bacon alternately on six skewers. Season with a half teaspoon salt and half teaspoon pepper, lightly roll in oil, then in bread crumbs, arrange on a double broiler and broil five minutes on each side. Dress on a hot dish, pour a tablespoon maitre d'hotel butter over them and serve.
A straightforward broiler dish from the era of the hinged wire grill, when clams were cheap and shucking them was a routine skill. Almost everything here still works; the timing is the part to ignore.
- Cut the broiling timeTen minutes total will turn blanched clams into erasers. Once the clams have been scalded and the crumbs applied, two to three minutes a side under a hot broiler is enough to color the crumbs and crisp the bacon.
- "Soft clams"These are soft-shell clams, Mya arenaria — steamers or longnecks, not littlenecks or quahogs. Forty-eight medium ones is several pounds in the shell.
- "All sandy parts"This is the hinge of the dish. Soft-shells carry grit in the stomach and a tough dark sheath over the siphon; strip the sheath off and pinch away the dark belly, keeping the body and the firm neck meat. Purging the live clams in salted water for an hour first removes most of the sand before you ever open them.
- The one-minute blanchNot cooking, but firming — it sets the flabby raw body so it will stay on a skewer. Drain well and pat dry or the crumbs will slide off.
- Bacon squaresCut from thin-sliced lean bacon, about ¾ inch on a side, so each piece sits flat between clams. Thick-cut modern bacon will still be raw when the clams are done; slice it thin or lay it briefly in a pan first.
- "Double broiler"A hinged two-sided wire broiler basket that clamps the food so the whole rack can be flipped. A rimmed sheet pan with a wire rack under the oven broiler does the same job; turn the skewers with tongs.
- Maître d'hôtel butterSoftened butter worked with chopped parsley, lemon juice, salt and pepper — a tablespoon per platter is modest, and you may want two or three.
- Skewers and yieldSix skewers, eight clams each: six appetizer portions or three light main courses. Soak wooden skewers 30 minutes so the exposed ends do not char.
Soft-shell clams were an everyday New England and Mid-Atlantic food in the years around this book, dug on tidal flats by the bushel and sold far more cheaply than oysters, which is why they turn up skewered eight to a stick rather than treated as a luxury. En brochette — French for "on a skewer" — was the standard hotel and restaurant term for the treatment, and pairing a soft shellfish with bacon and crumbs before broiling was the same logic that produced angels on horseback and devilled oysters: fat and a crust to protect a delicate body from direct heat. The maître d'hôtel butter finishing the plate is the most conventional of the compound butters in professional kitchens of the period.