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Soft Clams, Griswold
Open forty-eight good-sized very fresh soft clams. Remove all sandy parts, keeping nothing but the perfect bodies, plunge in a quart of boiling water two minutes, drain and place in a sautoire with quarter teaspoon finely chopped parsley, quarter teaspoon chopped chervil, half teaspoon salt, saltspoon cayenne pepper, two tablespoons port wine and two tablespoons good brandy. Carefully mix by shuffling pan. Cover pan and let steam five minutes. Transfer clams into a chafing dish or soup tureen, spread a Hollandaise sauce over, finely chop half a medium seeded green pepper, sprinkle it over the clams and serve without mixing.
A chafing-dish course from the era when soft clams were sold by the hundred and Hollandaise was assumed knowledge. Nothing here is difficult, but the margin between tender and rubbery is about ninety seconds.
- The hinge: total cooking timeTwo minutes in boiling water plus five minutes covered is already at the limit for shucked soft clams. Pull them the moment the bellies firm; another two minutes and they turn to erasers, and no amount of sauce hides it.
- "Soft clams" and the sandy partsThese are soft-shell clams, also sold as steamers or longnecks — not littlenecks or quahogs. Removing "all sandy parts" means slipping the dark sheath off the siphon and cutting away the stomach and dark gut, keeping the belly and foot. Forty-eight clams is a lot of hand work; allow half an hour.
- Sautoire and chafing dishA sautoire is a straight-sided sauté pan with a lid — any wide skillet with a cover does the job. "Shuffling the pan" means tossing rather than stirring, so the bellies stay whole. The chafing dish is a serving vessel over a spirit lamp; a warmed shallow bowl works.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is roughly a quarter teaspoon, so the cayenne here is a real presence, not a whisper. Scale down if your cayenne is fresh and strong.
- ChervilFresh chervil is seasonal and scarce in most markets. Equal parts parsley and a few tarragon leaves give a passable stand-in; dried chervil has almost no aroma and is not worth using.
- The HollandaiseThe original assumes you have it on hand. About a cup finished sauce covers forty-eight clams. Make it while the clams are being cleaned and hold it at no more than 140F over warm water — the clams will not wait while you rescue a broken emulsion.
- Port and brandyFour tablespoons of spirits into a covered pan will not fully cook off in five minutes, which is the point: the liquor is meant to be tasted. Use a tawny or ruby port and a drinkable brandy rather than cooking wine.
- YieldForty-eight clams serves four generously as a first course, or two as a supper dish. Serve at once, unmixed, so the green pepper stays raw and sharp against the sauce.
The recipe comes from Alexander Filippini, long a chef at Delmonico's in New York, whose books are full of dishes carrying the surnames of patrons and colleagues — a Gilded Age convention in which a regular customer might be commemorated in the menu rather than the guest book. Whether the Griswold here was a diner, a club, or someone in the kitchen is not recorded, and the safest thing to say is that the name is decoration rather than description. What the dish does record precisely is the chafing-dish craze of the 1890s and 1900s, when the spirit-lamp table service made shellfish in wine, brandy and Hollandaise a fashionable late supper for after the theatre. Soft-shell clams, cheap and abundant along the Atlantic coast, were the natural raw material: eaten steamed in the shell by the bucket in New England shore houses, and dressed up like this in restaurants that wanted a French sauce over an American ingredient.