Home › The World's Kitchen › Soft Clams, Newburg
Soft Clams, Newburg
Open thirty-six good-sized, fresh, soft clams; discard all the hard parts, keeping nothing but the perfect bodies. Plunge them into a quart of boiling water for a minute. Lift up, drain well; place in a saucepan with half gill sherry. Season with a teaspoon salt, two saltspoons cayenne pepper and a saltspoon grated nutmeg; cook for one minute on a very brisk fire; then add one and a half gills cream and one gill cold milk and slowly boil for five minutes. Add half ounce butter and the yolks of three eggs diluted in two tablespoons cream. Shuffle the sauce by the handle of the pan, while heating for three minutes, without boiling. Pour into a chafing dish or hot-soup tureen and serve.
A chafing-dish supper dish from the era when Newburg sauce was the mark of a fashionable kitchen. The whole thing takes about fifteen minutes, and the only difficult moment is the last one.
- The hinge: never let the yolks boilOnce the three yolks go in, the sauce must stay below a simmer — roughly 170–180F. The instruction to "shuffle the sauce by the handle of the pan" means swirling the pan rather than stirring, which keeps the eggs moving without whipping air in; the recipe keeps it over gentle heat for the full three minutes. If it boils it will curdle into scrambled egg in thin milk, and no amount of beating brings it back.
- Gills and saltspoonsA gill is 1/4 cup, so half a gill of sherry is 2 tablespoons, one and a half gills of cream is 6 tablespoons, and a gill of milk is 1/4 cup. A saltspoon is 1/4 teaspoon.
- The cayenne is fierceTwo saltspoons is a full 1/2 teaspoon of cayenne in a sauce built on about 3/4 cup of dairy. Cayenne is part of the standard Newburg formula, but start with 1/8 teaspoon and add to taste.
- SaltA full teaspoon is heavy given that the clams carry their own salt. Season lightly at the start and correct at the end, after the cream has reduced.
- Soft clams and the "hard parts"Soft clams are softshell steamers (Mya arenaria) — the long-necked ones. Discarding the hard parts means slipping the tough black sheath off the siphon and cutting away the neck, keeping the plump belly and mantle. Thirty-six shucked steamers, once the necks are discarded, will yield somewhat under a pound of meat.
- Cook them lessA minute in boiling water plus five minutes of slow boiling in cream will make clam bellies firm and grainy. Blanch briefly, then add them to the finished sauce for the last minute or two of heating rather than boiling them in it.
- The sherryUse a dry amontillado or fino, not cooking sherry, and give it a few seconds over high heat to burn off the raw edge before the dairy goes in.
- YieldEnough for four as a light main course over toast points or rice, six as a first course. Serve at once; reheating splits the sauce.
Newburg sauce — cream, sherry, cayenne, egg yolk — is generally traced to Delmonico's in New York in the 1870s, where it is said to have been introduced as "Lobster à la Wenberg" after a shipping merchant named Ben Wenberg, and rechristened by transposing the first syllables after he and the restaurant fell out. Whatever the truth of the anecdote, the sauce became a fixture of American chafing-dish cookery, and by the time this book appeared cooks were applying it to anything from crab to sweetbreads. Soft clams were a logical candidate: cheap, abundant along the whole northeastern seaboard, and dug by the bushel where lobster had to be bought. The direction to pour it into a chafing dish or hot-soup tureen is the period detail worth noticing — the cooking is done in a saucepan, and the chafing dish serves only to bring the finished dish to table and keep it warm.