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May 18
Menu: Strawberries; Lentil Soup, au Maigre; Scalloped Clams Stewed Tomatoes; Beet and Cabbage Salad; Vanilla Ice Cream; Maple Sauce; Coffee Scalloped Clams-Chop 25 clams fine and season with red pepper and salt to taste. Blend together 1 tablespoon each Crisco and flour, and cook with 1 cup liquid, half milk and half clam juice, with a tiny pinch of soda, and stir until smooth and creamy. Add chopped clams with 1 beaten egg. Have ready large clam or scallop shells, Crisco on inside and fill with clam mixture, smoothing over with silver knife blade. Arrange on baking dish and bake about 6 minutes, or until well browned. Garnish with parsley and pass sliced lemons with them.
A thickened clam mixture baked in shells, from the promotional cookbook Procter & Gamble issued to teach cooks to use its new vegetable shortening. The recipe assumes you are shucking your own clams and that your oven is very hot.
- Oven heatThe book gives no temperature. Six minutes to a browned top implies a hot oven, somewhere in the region of 450F, or a few minutes under the broiler. At 350F the filling will mostly just warm through and take much longer to colour.
- CriscoPlain vegetable shortening, then a novelty. Butter can be used in its place both in the roux and for greasing the shells.
- The clamsTwenty-five clams means small hard-shell clams, littlenecks or cherrystones, shucked raw with their liquor saved. Two 6.5 oz cans of chopped clams plus their juice is a fair substitute; drain and measure the juice before making up the cup of liquid.
- The pinch of sodaClam liquor is salty and mildly acidic, and milk can curdle as it heats with it; the soda is there to counter that and keep the sauce smooth. A scant eighth teaspoon at most -- more and the mixture can taste soapy and go slightly grey.
- Don't cook the clams twiceChopped raw clams stirred into the hot sauce are effectively done. The bake is for browning only, which is why the time is so short. Longer and the clams tighten into rubber.
- ShellsReal scallop or clam shells hold about 1/3 cup each; this filling makes four to six. Ovenproof ramekins or a shallow gratin dish do the same job. Set them on a sheet pan, as the period instruction to "arrange on baking dish" intends.
- Browning without crumbsThere is no crumb topping here, so what colour there is comes from the egg beaten into the filling and the smoothed surface. If the top stays pale, a light dusting of dry crumbs or a minute closer to the element fixes it.
- ServingFour as a first course, two as a light supper. The sliced lemon passed at table is not decoration; the acid is needed against the enriched sauce.
The Story of Crisco (1913) belongs to a genre of cookbook written to create demand for a single product: Procter & Gamble had begun selling hydrogenated cottonseed oil in 1911 and needed to convince cooks that something neither butter nor lard had a place in their kitchens. The "Calendar of Dinners" section dates every menu, so this dish is filed under May 19 as part of a full day's eating rather than presented on its own. Scalloped clams themselves long predate the book and are a fixture of the American Atlantic coast, where hard-shell clams were cheap and plentiful; "scalloped" here retains its older sense of food baked and served in a shell. The instruction to smooth the top with a silver knife is a small period tell -- silver was often said to be preferable for fish and shellfish because ordinary steel blades of the day discoloured on contact with them, though that rationale is more repeated than documented.