Clam Soup
"First catch your clams along the ebbing edges Of saline cores you'll find the precious wedges With backs up, lurking in the sandy bottom; Pull in your iron rake, and lo, you've got 'em.
Take thirty large ones, put a basin under, Add water (three quarts) to the native liquor, Bring to the boil (and by the way, the quicker It boils the better, if you do it cutely).
Now add the clams, chopped up and minced minutely, Allow a longer boil of just three minutes, And while it bubbles, quickly stir within its Tumultuous depths, where still the mollusks mutter, Four tablespoons of flour and four of butter, A pint of milk, some pepper to your notion; And clams need salting, although born of ocean; Remove from fire (if much boiled they will suffer, You'll find that India rubber isn't tougher), After it is off add three fresh eggs well beaten; Stir once more, and ready to be eaten.
Fruit of the wave; Oh dainty and delicious!
Food for the gods; Ambrosia for Aspicius!
Worthy to thrill the soul of sea-born Venus Or titillate the palate of Silemus.”
A recipe in rhymed couplets, but a workable one: the proportions are all there, and the poem is unusually clear about the one thing that ruins clams. Read it as a base of clam broth thickened with a butter-and-flour roux, enriched with milk and finished with beaten egg.
- Do not let it boil once the clams are inDo not overcook once the clams are in -- The verse calls for a boil of just three minutes and then warns outright that "if much boiled they will suffer, You'll find that India rubber isn't tougher." Three minutes is the outside limit; past that the meat tightens and turns rubbery, and no amount of further cooking softens it again.
- Which clams"Thirty large ones" points to hard-shell clams of the quahog or chowder-clam sort, raked from a sandy bottom as the opening lines describe, rather than small littlenecks or steamers. Reserve every drop of the liquor released when you open them; that is the "native liquor" the recipe counts on for flavour.
- Three quarts is a lot of waterThree quarts plus a pint of milk gives something over three and a half quarts of soup for thirty clams, which is thin by modern taste. Halving the water produces something much closer to a chowder, in correspondingly fewer and richer servings.
- The butter and flourStirring four tablespoons each of flour and butter directly into boiling liquid will give lumps. Cook them together in a separate pan into a pale roux first, then whisk the hot broth into it, or work the butter and flour into a paste and add it in small pieces.
- The eggsThree beaten eggs stirred into hot soup off the heat thicken it and give a silky body, but they will scramble if the pot is still near boiling. Temper them: whisk a ladle of hot soup into the eggs, then return the mixture to the pot and do not reheat above a gentle steam.
- SaltingThe joke about clams needing salt despite being born of ocean is fair advice, but salt at the end. Clam liquor varies enormously in saltiness and three quarts of water dilutes it unpredictably.
- GritThe poem is silent on cleaning. Purge the clams in cold salted water for an hour, and strain the liquor through a cloth before it goes anywhere near the soup.
Verse recipes were a minor Victorian and Edwardian genre, printed in newspapers and household columns and clipped into scrapbooks, which is how a good many of them found their way into compilations like this one. The closing lines invoke Aspicius \the the name attached to the surviving Roman collection of recipes being Apicius \the along with Venus, born of the sea, and Silenus, the drunken companion of Bacchus. The clams themselves are American and unglamorous: hard-shell quahogs raked from tidal flats along the Atlantic coast, cheap, abundant, and gathered by the bucket rather than bought. The opening instruction to catch them yourself is a nod to the old cookery-book joke, generally traced to a hare recipe, about first catching your hare.