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Soft Clams, Garrett
Procure twenty-four opened very fresh, good-sized soft clams; clean thoroughly, keeping nothing but the perfect bodies. Plunge in boiling water for two minutes, remove and drain well on a sieve. Heat two tablespoons butter in a saucepan, add two tablespoons flour, stir briskly with a wooden spoon; moisten with half a pint of white broth. Season with half teaspoon salt, a saltspoon red pepper and a saltspoon ground nutmeg. Pour in half gill sherry, add half teaspoon freshly chopped parsley and half a teaspoon chopped chives. Mix well and let slowly boil for ten minutes. Dilute an egg yolk with a tablespoon cream and add it to the sauce, carefully mixing it. Now add the clams, gently mix a little, then heat without boiling for one minute. Pour into a baking dish, sprinkle over a tablespoon Parmesan cheese and bake in the oven for six minutes. Remove and serve.
A creamed clam gratin built on a velouté with an egg-yolk liaison. Nearly all the risk is in overcooking; the clams are done before they ever reach the oven.
- The hinge: heat, don't boilOnce the yolk and cream go in, the sauce must not simmer or it will curdle into grainy threads. Keep it below a shiver, and give the clams their one minute of warming only.
- Soft clamsThese are steamers (Mya arenaria), sold live in the shell or shucked. "Nothing but the perfect bodies" means pulling off the tough black sheath from the siphon and discarding it; many cooks also snip away the dark stomach mass. Twenty-four good-sized clams yield roughly a cup of meat.
- Old measuresHalf a pint of broth is 1 cup. A gill is half a cup, so half a gill of sherry is 1/4 cup. A saltspoon is 1/4 teaspoon, so the cayenne and nutmeg are 1/4 teaspoon each.
- White brothA light unbrowned stock, veal or chicken, unsalted or barely salted. Modern canned broth is salty enough that the half teaspoon of salt should be held back until the sauce is tasted.
- Red pepperCayenne, not paprika and not crushed chile flake. A quarter teaspoon in a cup of sauce is assertive but not fierce.
- The sherryDry or medium-dry (fino or amontillado), and it goes in early so the ten-minute simmer cooks off the raw edge. Cooking sherry from the grocery shelf is salted and will throw the seasoning off.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. Six minutes is only enough to glaze the top, so use a hot oven, 450F, or simply run the dish under the broiler until the Parmesan colors.
- YieldServes four as a first course, two as a light main with toast. It can be divided among individual gratin dishes, which shortens the oven time further.
Filippini's International Cook Book (1906) runs to thousands of short entries, a great many of them named for patrons, colleagues and public figures of the New York dining rooms where he worked; "Garrett" may well belong to that group, though the book identifies no one by that name. The dish itself is a straightforward French treatment of a distinctly American shellfish: soft clams, the long-necked steamers of the Atlantic sand flats, were cheap and abundant in the Northeast and usually eaten plainly steamed with broth and butter. Dressing them in a velouté finished with egg yolk and cream, then gratinéed with Parmesan, is the standard restaurant move of the period, taking a homely local ingredient and giving it the vocabulary of the classical kitchen.