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Clam Cocktails (Put into each tall thin glass)
Put into each tall thin glass, five small clams, add one tablespoonful of lemon juice, one tablespoonful of tomato catsup, a pinch of salt and two drops of tabasco sauce. Nearly fill the glasses with the strained clam liquor, add to each one tablespoonful of shaved ice and one-half teaspoonful of grated horseradish and serve at once.
A raw clam cocktail served in a glass rather than on the half shell — closer to a drink than a dish. Nothing here needs cooking, so everything depends on the clams themselves.
- The clams"Five small clams" presumably means five shucked hard-shell clams of the littleneck size range; the recipe does not name a variety. Buy live shellstock with its dealer tag intact and shuck it yourself the same day; the clams should close when tapped and smell of clean seawater.
- Raw shellfish riskRaw clams carry a real risk of norovirus and Vibrio species, and no amount of lemon juice or tabasco reduces it. Anyone pregnant, immunocompromised, elderly, or with liver disease should not eat this; the same applies to raw oysters.
- Clam liquorThe liquor is the juice released when the clams are opened — catch it in a bowl beneath the shucking knife and strain it through a fine sieve or cheesecloth to remove shell grit. Five clams will not yield anything like enough to nearly fill a glass, so expect to shuck a good many more than the five that go into each cocktail.
- Shaved iceA tablespoon of shaved ice per glass is for chill, not dilution, so shave or crush it finely rather than using cubes. Chill the glasses first and the ice will not melt into the liquor before it reaches the table.
- Tomato catsupCommercial catsup of this period was generally thinner, sharper and often more heavily spiced than the modern product. Today's ketchup is noticeably sweeter, so a chili sauce or a plain tomato purée with extra lemon comes nearer the original.
- HorseradishGrate it fresh if you can; jarred prepared horseradish is already cut with vinegar and will read as sharper and more acidic against the lemon. Add it last, as the original does, since freshly grated horseradish loses pungency fairly quickly once exposed to air.
- Yield and servingOne glass per person, served immediately as a first course. The recipe calls for a tall thin glass rather than a tumbler; the exact form is not specified.
Clam and oyster cocktails belong to the later nineteenth-century American vogue for raw shellfish, when clams and oysters were cheap and plentiful and eaten in quantities that now seem improbable. The "cocktail" name appears to have been borrowed from the bar rather than the kitchen: the dish is served in stemware, laced with something hot, and drunk as much as eaten. Tabasco, made commercially in Louisiana from 1868, was among the first bottled hot sauces widely available to home cooks.