HOW TO BE A SEA SCROUNGE
(Page 3 of 9)
The most common way to eat steamers is—you guessed
it—steamed. Place a bunch of the soft-shells in a
kettle, cover them with water and boil for about twenty
minutes. Then eat 'em right out of the shell dipped in your
favorite melted-butter sauce. Just flip the clams out,
strip away the papery brown membranes, swirl the delicious
little critters in the butter and pop 'em in your mouth. If
you're one of the queasy uninitiated, have someone else
prepare your first clam and keep your eyes closed until
it's down the hatch. The unaesthetic appearance will be
quickly forgotten once you discover the delectable taste.
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Soft-shells can also be eaten raw, boiled, fried, baked,
chowdered, curried, spaghettied and stuffed . . . check any
good cookbook or Euell Gibbons' STALKING THE BLUE-EYED
SCALLOP for recipes. You'll have to shuck the clams
for most of these dishes but, with steamers, that's a snap.
Just slip a thin knife into either end of the shell and
sever the adductor muscles. When the shell comes apart, cut
the meat loose and trim off the siphon with scissors. Raw
clams can be juicy, so open them over a bowl to catch the
liquid which can be drunk hot, mixed with tomato juice and
Worcestershire sauce or added to stuffings.
Hard clams or quahogs are also found up and down the East
Coast but are harder to spot than steamers since they grow
under three or more feet of water in the muddy bottoms of
inlets and estuaries. Once located, however, this
particular shellfish is usually easy to harvest
because it has a very short siphon (this clam is sometimes
called the littleneck) which forces it to live just beneath
the mud's surface. You can, in fact, gather littlenecks as
the Indians sometimes did . . . by feeling for them with
your toes as you walk in the offshore muck. Hard
clams—just like the soft-shells—tend to be
social creatures and, where you find one, you'll generally
find more.
Scrub and carefully inspect the shells of your hard clams
before you eat them. Very small quahogs are called
cherrystones and are delicious raw. Larger hard clams will
open if steamed for 20 minutes and can then be gobbled down
as is or served in any of the dishes suggested for
soft-shell clams.
Mussels can also be prepared in the same manner and perhaps
the best of the lot is the very dark-colored blue mussel.
It's found on the East Coast from North Carolina all the
way up to far, far northern Canada and on some parts of the
West Coast. Many other varieties are also edible, but steer
away from the 4-5" straited mussel which ranges from a
brownish to a yellow-greenish color and is disagreeable in
taste.
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