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Soft Clams, Hussard
Open forty-eight fresh soft clams, remove sandy parts, keeping nothing but the perfect bodies, and thoroughly wash and brush forty-eight of the half shells. Finely chop six sound shallots, place them in a small saucepan with a tablespoon melted butter and gently cook for three minutes, stirring once in a while, then add six finely chopped fresh, peeled mushrooms and cook for five minutes. Divide mushrooms in the forty-eight half shells evenly, place a clam in each shell, evenly season with a half teaspoon salt and three saltspoons paprika. Finely chop three Spanish sweet red peppers and evenly sprinkle them over clams, place a very thin piece raw bacon on top of each, spread over two tablespoons bread crumbs; set in oven to bake for fifteen minutes, remove, dress on a large dish and serve with six quarters of lemon.
A baked clam on the half shell, built in forty-eight identical units — banquet work from a chef's book, scaled for a dinner table rather than a household. The whole thing hinges on getting the clams out of their shells cleanly and on an oven hot enough to crisp the bacon before the clam overcooks.
- Oven temperatureFilippini gives none, which was normal for a professional book. Fifteen minutes for something this small means a hot oven: 425–450F. At 350F the bacon will still be flabby and the crumbs pale when the clams have gone tough.
- Soft clams are steamersThese are Mya arenaria, the long-necked soft-shell clam, not littlenecks or cherrystones. Raw ones are awkward to open — a thin knife along the gape, then trim away the black-tipped siphon sheath and the dark stomach mass, which is presumably what the recipe means by "sandy parts." Steaming them open for half a minute and then shucking is an easier route to the same place.
- The shells will not sit flatSoft-shell valves are thin, brittle and dished. Lay them on a bed of coarse rock salt in a sheet pan so they stay level and the juices do not run out.
- SaltspoonA quarter teaspoon. Three saltspoons of paprika is about three-quarters of a teaspoon spread over four dozen clams — a tint more than a seasoning.
- Spanish sweet red peppersPimientos, sold then in tins packed in Spain and now as jarred roasted red peppers. "Three" means three whole peppers, so drain and chop about half a cup. Fresh red bell pepper works but will still be raw in fifteen minutes; roast or sweat it first.
- The baconIt must be sliced very thin and cut small, roughly one inch square per clam, or it shields the crumbs and renders fat into the shell instead of crisping. Thinly sliced pancetta is a good substitute.
- Crumb quantityTwo tablespoons of dry crumbs across forty-eight shells is a dusting, not a topping. Resist the urge to bury them — the dish is meant to read as clam, not gratin.
- YieldForty-eight clams and six lemon quarters point to six servings of eight as a first course. To scale down to one portion, divide by six: eight clams, one shallot, one mushroom, a scrap of pimiento.
Names ending in à la hussarde run through nineteenth-century French professional cookery and generally signal the cavalry hussar — light horsemen associated with Hungary — as shorthand for a dish built on onion or shallot, often with paprika or horseradish somewhere in it. Alexander Filippini, long the chef at Delmonico's in New York, worked in exactly that register: a French kitchen vocabulary applied to American market ingredients, here the soft-shell clam of the Atlantic coast. The result is a hybrid typical of the book — paprika, Spanish pimiento, a French shallot-and-mushroom base, and a New England bivalve, all assembled in a shell and counted out by the dozen for a hotel dining room.