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Clams Sauted and Creamed
Pick over, rinse quickly and drain on a towel two strings of soft-shelled clams. Chop fine and season with onequarter of a teaspoon each of salt and pepper. Heat one tablespoonful of butter in a frying pan and drop in the clams by spoonfuls. When well browned turn each spoonful carefully over and brown on the other side. Now with a spoon break up the mixture and dredge over it one tablespoonful of flour, turning and stirring until it is absorbed. Add gradually one-half of a cup of cream or rich milk, stir until it thickens and boils, add more seasoning if necessary and serve on thin buttered toast.
A quick creamed-clam mixture served open-face on toast, from the sandwich chapter. Nearly everything here still works; the sticking points are the unit of measure and the clams themselves.
- "Two strings" is ambiguousA string was an informal market bundle rather than a standardised measure, and no reliable conversion exists. Work from the finished dish instead: something on the order of a pint of shucked soft-shell clam meat, roughly a pound, seems about right for one tablespoon of butter, one of flour and half a cup of cream.
- Soft-shell clamsThese are steamers or longnecks, Mya arenaria, sold live in the shell or shucked at a good fish counter. The tough sheath covering the siphon should be peeled off before chopping, and the dark belly is usually left in for flavour.
- Grit is the real hazardSoft-shells burrow in mud and hold sand in the belly. "Rinse quickly" understates it — live clams want half an hour in cold salted water to purge, and shucked meats want a rinse and a careful pick-through, since one gritty batch ruins the whole pan.
- Drain them dryThe towel is not incidental. Wet chopped clams will steam rather than brown, and the browning is what gives the dish its character. Press them dry and get the butter properly hot before the spoonfuls go in.
- Cream or rich milkPeriod "rich milk" generally meant unskimmed or top milk, somewhere in the range of modern half-and-half. Heavy cream will thicken faster than the recipe expects; add it in stages and stop when the mixture coats the spoon, or it will be stiff by the time it reaches the toast.
- Don't cook it outClams toughen fast. Once the flour is absorbed and the cream has thickened and come to a boil, the dish is done — a minute or two more turns the meat rubbery.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; the quantities suggest enough for two as a lunch dish, or three or four as a first course.
Soft-shell clams were cheap, abundant and thoroughly local along the North Atlantic coast when this book was compiled, dug from tidal flats from Long Island to Maine and sold in informal market lots -- the recipe's "string," or the peck -- rather than by weight. Turn-of-the-century American cookbooks are full of creamed shellfish on toast -- creamed oysters, creamed lobster, clam toast -- because the formula solved a practical problem: a small quantity of expensive or perishable protein, stretched with a butter-and-flour thickening and a little cream, made a hot dish for several people in ten minutes. Its placement in the sandwich chapter reflects a broader definition than ours; a number of Victorian and Edwardian "sandwiches" were open-face and eaten with a fork, served at luncheons, teas and the light suppers that followed a heavy midday dinner. The browning step here is worth noting, since creamed-shellfish recipes more often simply poach the meat.