Home › The World's Kitchen › Soft Shell Clams, Vaudeville
Soft Shell Clams, Vaudeville
Heat in a small saucepan one and a half tablespoons butter, adding six finely chopped shallots; cook for five minutes, occasionally stirring meanwhile, then mix in two tablespoons flour, pour in one gill hot milk, one gill cream and two tablespoons sherry. Season with half teaspoon salt, a saltspoon cayenne pepper and half a saltspoon grated nutmeg; then continually mix until it comes to a boil. Thoroughly clean thirty-six good-sized fresh, soft clams, keeping nothing but the perfect bodies, totally cleared of sand. Plunge them in a quart of boiling water for one minute. Thoroughly drain and add them to the sauce; gently mix, being careful not to break the bodies; cook for one minute. Pour into a baking dish, dredge a tablespoon bread crumbs over them and arrange a few small bits of butter over the surface. Set in the oven to bake for five minutes. Remove and serve.
A short, rich clam gratin from the Filippini school, written for a cook who already knows how to shuck and clean steamers. Two things need translating: the measures, and the fact that no oven temperature is given.
- Gill and saltspoonA gill is half a cup, so the sauce takes 1/2 cup hot milk and 1/2 cup cream. A saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, giving 1/4 teaspoon cayenne (assertive) and 1/8 teaspoon nutmeg.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given, and the recipe supplies no descriptor to translate; a hot oven, somewhere in the region of 425-450F, is a reasonable modern reading if five minutes is to brown the crumbs, and the dish goes in already hot. Longer than that and the clams toughen.
- Soft shell clamsThese are steamers or long-necks, Mya arenaria — not littlenecks or quahogs. "Perfect bodies" means shucked meats with the black sheath peeled off the siphon and the gritty stomach handled carefully; thirty-six good-sized clams yields roughly a pound of meat.
- Sand is the whole problemSoft shells hold grit in a way hard shells do not. Purge them in cold salted water for an hour or two before shucking, then rinse the shucked meats individually. Any sand left will not cook out and will ruin the sauce.
- ShallotsSix shallots here probably means small ones; two to three modern shallots, finely chopped, is likely the equivalent volume. Cook them in the butter without colour, then let the flour cook a minute before the liquid goes in.
- Don't overcook the clamsThe one-minute blanch and one-minute turn in the sauce are deliberate. Total exposure to heat before the oven should stay at about two minutes; clam bodies go rubbery quickly, and the bake finishes them.
- YieldServes four as a first course, two as a supper dish. Individual gratin dishes brown better than one large one and shorten the bake.
Alexander Filippini spent many years in the Delmonico's kitchens before compiling his cookbooks, and the naming convention here is pure late-nineteenth-century restaurant practice: dishes were tagged after theatres, performers, patrons and fashionable amusements, so a cream-and-sherry gratin becomes "Vaudeville" without any particular claim about its origin. Soft shell clams were then a cheap, abundant Atlantic-coast shellfish, dug from tidal flats from the Chesapeake to Maine and more often steamed by the bucket or fried than dressed in a sherried béchamel — treating them this way is the restaurant gesture, taking a commonplace ingredient and putting it in a gratin dish. The sherry, nutmeg and cayenne trio is a common American seasoning for creamed shellfish of the period, much like that used for oyster and lobster Newburg.