Home › The World's Kitchen › Soft Clams, Louisiana
Soft Clams, Louisiana
Open forty-eight very fresh soft clams and remove all sandy parts, keeping nothing but the perfect bodies. Thoroughly wash and brush forty-eight half-shells and discard the other forty-eight, place one clam in each half-shell, place in roasting pan one beside another, then season them evenly with a teaspoon salt and half teaspoon paprika. Chop exceedingly fine one seedless green pepper, four branches crisp celery, and evenly sprinkle them over the clams. Cut from lean bacon eight very thin slices, then cut each slice in six even pieces, arrange a piece on top of each clam, sprinkle over two tablespoons bread crumbs, then set in oven for fifteen minutes, remove, dress them on a dish and serve.
A straightforward baked clam on the half shell, with the seasoning doing the work. Two things the original leaves out: an oven temperature and any way of keeping the shells upright.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. Fifteen minutes with thin bacon on top wants a hot oven, 425F, so the bacon renders and colors before the clams tighten. Lower than that and you get pale bacon over overcooked clams.
- Which clam"Soft clams" means soft-shell clams, Mya arenaria, the steamer of the Atlantic coast. Their shells are thin, brittle and gape at one end, so they make poor cups. Littlenecks or small cherrystones hold their shape and liquor far better if you want the dish to look like the description.
- "All sandy parts"On a soft-shell clam this means peeling the black membrane from the siphon and discarding the dark stomach mass. What Filippini calls the "perfect body" is the firm white foot and adductor with the belly removed.
- Steadying the shellsLine the roasting pan with a bed of coarse rock salt or crumpled foil and press each shell into it. Otherwise the shells rock, the liquor runs out, and the clams bake dry.
- SaltA teaspoon of salt across 48 clams is modest, but the clams carry seawater and the bacon carries more. Season the vegetables rather than the clams themselves, or leave the salt out and taste one before committing the pan.
- Bread crumbsTwo tablespoons over four dozen clams is a dusting, not a crust, which is clearly the intent. Toss them with a little melted butter first so they brown instead of scorching in a 425F oven.
- "Seedless green pepper"Simply a green bell pepper with the seeds and ribs cut out. "Four branches celery" means four ribs, not four heads.
- BaconModern supermarket bacon sliced at standard thickness will not crisp in fifteen minutes. Ask for it shaved thin, or lay the pieces on a rack in the hot oven for three or four minutes first.
- YieldForty-eight clams serves six to eight as a first course. The proportions scale down cleanly by the dozen.
The name locates the seasoning, not the shellfish: soft-shell clams are a cold-water Atlantic animal, dug from New England and mid-Atlantic flats, while paprika, green pepper and celery are the shorthand a Gilded Age kitchen used to signal Louisiana. Green pepper and celery are two of the three Creole aromatics, wanting only the onion, and by the time Alexander Filippini compiled The International Cook Book in 1906 such geographic labels arguably functioned less as provenance than as a menu-writer's code — "Louisiana" meant pepper and celery the way "Florentine" meant spinach. Filippini had spent years at Delmonico's in New York; the regional epithet was the kind of variation that let one shellfish appear a dozen ways across a long carte.