A peck of clams, just harvested

As a food, clams are a bit inscrutable. The flesh is locked up tight between two shells and, once released either by shucking or by cooking, reveals a mysterious anatomy unlike that of the birds and mammals we cooks are used to.

There are some go-to recipes for clams, like chowder and clam sauce and stuffed clams, but I think clams’ culinary utility extends farther. The discovery I’ve made about them is that, if you handle them right, you get a neutral, albeit salty, protein that can go almost anywhere.

While “co-hog” might sound like what Kevin and I do to the dessert, it’s also the pronunciation of “quahog,” the hardshell clam native to our area. Quahogs go by other names, depending on size. The smallest ones are littlenecks, followed by top neck, cherrystone, and chowder.

I don’t believe there are any hard-and-fast size delineations, but a littleneck is about two inches across, top neck a little bigger, cherrystone up to three inches, and chowder bigger than that. How’s that for definitive?

A clamming expedition generally yields a mix of sizes, and we usually eat littlenecks and top necks raw, and cook the rest. And, because I have vast clam experience, I’m going to break out of my pattern of blathering about what we do here and actually talk about something useful, like turning clams into a neutral, salty, cheap, healthful, all-purpose protein.

And, although it is a cruel twist of fate that consigns a singularly unskilled photographer with woefully inadequate equipment to the task of photographing the least attractive of all edible creatures, I’m going to include pictures.

It’ll be fun.

You start with a bunch of quahogs. Ideally, they’re cherrystone-size and above. Since each clam requires a bit of work, and the big ones don’t taste appreciably different from the small ones, big ones are ideal. Less work, same product. But use what you have.

If they’re dirty, give them a rinse. There’s no need to get them sparkling clean, but you’ll probably be cooking with the liquid you steam them in, and you don’t want it dirtied by a lot of sea schmutz.

Next, steam them. Put them in a pot, but don’t fill it all the way to the top; the clams need some room to open. Put just a little bit of liquid in the pot. Just a little bit. Just enough so you have an eighth of an inch or so in the bottom of the pot. As the clams open, they release liquid, so you need just enough to get them started. If you start with too much liquid, your clam juice will be too dilute.

Which liquid? I’m glad you asked. Water is clearly traditional, and if you use it, you will end up with a nice bit of traditional clam juice at the bottom of your pot. But, depending on your application, you might want to try something different. If you’re doing a clam sauce or chowder, vermouth is great (and is required for my clam sauce recipe). Red or white wine, if you have it around and it’s not expensive, works like a charm. If you’re going to make a chili-style concoction (and clam and chipotle combine beautifully), steam them in a little beer.  Think outside the faucet.

Cover the pot, and put it over high heat until you start to see traces of steam leaking out under the lid. Then turn the heat down, or you’ll end up with clam juice bubbling out and making a mess. But don’t open the pot. You need the steam to build up in there and, as they say in the barbecue world, if you’re looking, you ain’t cooking.

When you suspect the clams have opened, that’s when you open the pot. It’s probably somewhere between five and ten minutes. You may hear them rustling around in there as the shells pop open, and that’s a good clue.

If some of the clams have opened but some haven’t, take out the opened ones with tongs, and put the top back on to keep steaming the rest. If, after a couple of iterations, you have one or two stubborn hold-outs, don’t throw them away – yet. Turn the heat off, and just leave the clams in the hot pot with the lid on. Chances are good that, after a while, they’ll give it up. Just give ‘em time.

Any clam that doesn’t open goes in the garbage. It was dead to begin with, and you don’t want to eat it.

Once the clams are cool enough to handle, pull them out of their shells. If one or both of the adductor muscles (those chewy round cylinders) come with it when you pull the clam body out, that’s fine. If they stay behind, attached to the shells, just leave them. It’s not worth the effort to get them out.

And now the fun begins. First, you want to separate your clams into two parts. There’s a section that’s the belly and foot, and it’s surrounded by a bunch of other stuff, including the adductor muscles (if they came out), the mantle, and various mysterious innards. There are two reasons to separate one from the other.  The first is that, if there’s any grit in your clams, it will usually be caught in between these two parts, and if you rinse as you separate, you will de-grit very effectively.  The second reason is that, if you decide you want some larger pieces of clam in your dish, you’ll want to cut those pieces from the belly-and-foot part.  (All this will make sense once you read the rest of the directions)

So, pull off the outer part with the mantle and mysterious innards – it comes off easily — from all your clams, and you’ll be left with two piles, one of belly-and-feet and one of everything else.

At this point, you have to decide whether to leave the bellies intact.  They contain the grayish-greenish stomach contents, which aren’t disgusting or bad-tasting, but they will give your clams a greenish cast if you leave them in. I usually squeeze out the bulk of them, but leave some bits behind.

And now comes the crucial step in transforming clams into a  neutral, salty, cheap, healthful, all-purpose protein. The big secret? You chop them in little pieces. Really little pieces.

When people say they don’t like clams, it’s almost always the texture they’re objecting to. And, let’s face it, tenderness isn’t a virtue that falls to the lot of the clam. At best, they are toothsome. At worst, they give rubber bands a run for their money.

Which is why, once you have your de-bellied, rinsed clams all ready to go, you just throw them in the grinder, all the parts together. If you don’t have a grinder, you can do this by hand, but it’s a big enough job that you’ll probably end up with imperfectly chopped clams and carpal tunnel syndrome.

Get a grinder.

I use the one attached to my KitchenAid stand mixer, an appliance you will have to pry out of my cold dead hands. Well, one of my cold dead hands. The other will be holding the VitaMix.

That pile of ground clams is your neutral, salty, cheap, healthful, all-purpose protein. And, if you started with a peck, you’ll have about six cups of it.

You can make this process either easier or more difficult, depending on your application and inclination. If you simply took the clams out of the shells and tossed them in the grinder, you’d be fine. You might have a bit of sand and you’d definitely have all the stomach stuff, but spicy composed dishes hide a multitude of sins.

And, if you wanted a few bigger pieces of clam in your dish, you chop the bellies and feet (the more tender parts) by hand, and just put the remaining miscellanea through the grinder. After you’ve done this once or twice, you’ll get a sense for how persnickety you want to be, and whether you want bigger pieces in your dish.

Below are links to some of the clam recipes I’ve developed over the years (some of which were written before I saw the light, and call for chopped clams), but there are a zillion other things you can do with them. Once you have ground clams, the world’s your oyster.

Perfect White Sauce
Clam and Andouille Stew
Clams Fra Diavolo
Goan Clams

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When Kevin and I first moved here, in spring of 2008, we thought it might be fun to try clamming, and after one or two ignominious failures (which you can read about in all their ignominious details in my favorite local publication, Edible Cape Cod), we managed to go out one day and dig up our dinner. It was astonishing to me that I could go out in the water at low tide, dig through the sand with a rake, and unearth something good to eat.

By the beginning of 2009, I’d become so taken with the idea of first-hand food that I started trying to eat at least one food every day that we’d hunted, gathered, fished, or grown, and I launched Starving to chronicle the effort.

Kevin and I still call that our Winter of Shellfish. We didn’t yet have chickens or hoophouse, and we didn’t go into that winter with stores of frozen fish, turkey, and tomatoes. We had clams. And oysters. And clams again. And again.

Since then, we’ve branched out, and lately I’ve done almost none of the kind of clamming that got me into this in the first place. We’ve eaten plenty of clams, but we’ve gotten them off our oyster grant, which has a patch left over from a clam-farming effort.

For the past month, though, we haven’t had to go out to the grant much, so, if I wanted clams I had to get them the old-fashioned way.

And I did want clams. Our friend Amanda is stopping by on her way to Ireland, and that’s a visit with white clam sauce written all over it.

This morning, it was nineteen degrees, with a stiff breeze out of the north. Low tide was at 9:00, so I didn’t have the luxury of waiting for it to warm up. I layered up, got my waders and clamming license, and headed out to the beach at the end of Bay Street, in Osterville.

It was cold enough to keep the crowds away, and I was the only one out there. I walked up the beach to where I knew clams used to be, and waded in. After trying three or four spots, I found them.

Clamming is hard work; it’s like digging. You work your rake deep into the sand, and then pull it through, hoping to feel the smooth shell of a clam. When you find one, you work the tines behind and under it, and pull it up. After about ten minutes of this, I was almost completely warm – the fingertips of my right hand were the only hold-outs. After thirty minutes, I had a peck of clams.

Since we started all this, I’ve wondered how long it would take for it to get stale. There’s no question that novelty is part of the appeal of everything we do, and if it’s most of the appeal … well, we should start apartment hunting in New York pretty soon.

But being out by myself, knee deep in North Bay, raking dinner up out of the sand, didn’t feel stale at all. It felt fresh and constructive, and I still marvel that there are so many things to eat in the water. It’s not quite the same as that very first clam, but it’s still got a long way to go before it gets to stale. Even as the novelty has begun to wear off, the satisfaction has been abiding, and satisfaction and clam sauce go a long way

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And then, inevitably, we start looking at real estate. Not because we’re planning to pull up stakes, fold our tent, close up shop, and leave Cape Cod. At least not today. It’s just that we can imagine a future somewhere else.

A couple weeks back, we spent a night and a day on Long Island’s North Fork, on our way home from Kevin’s family’s annual Christmas party. We’d been to the North Fork before; we have friends in Jamesport. In our hazy distant New York past, we’d visited a winery or two, and Kevin played the worst round of golf of his life at Island’s End, in Greenport. (He had a life-threatening case of the shanks.)

This visit, we had a leisurely breakfast at the Greenporter, with little pastries and the Sunday New York Times, and then went off to see what was to be seen. On the recommendation of the waitress, we stopped at a vineyard called The Old Field, in Southold.

We thought it would be the first of several stops, but it was not to be. Instead, we ended up talking to the owner, Chris Baiz, and his daughter, Perry Weiss, about winemaking, deer hunting, and oyster farming until we had to leave to catch the ferry. Other patrons came to the tasting room, tasted, and left again, and we were still there, tasting and talking.  

We were utterly charmed by these people, by the place, by the possibilities (and by Old Field wine, which we bought a lot of). You can grow things on Long Island – good things like grapes and oysters. There’s water all around for fishing and for looking at. There are more deer than you can shake a stick at. It’s beautiful and it feels remote, but it’s only two hours to Manhattan.

When we came home, Kevin started looking online and came up with the perfect property for us. Waterfront, along a stretch that looked perfect for growing oysters. Acreage, so we could plant things. The house needed work, but we could live with that. If we’d had three million in spare cash lying around, we might have bought it.

We could see a future on the North Fork, and we’ve also looked at houses and envisioned futures in Arizona, south Florida, Montreal, the Hudson Valley, New Hampshire, Sonoma county, and, in a real flight of fancy, Provence. There are lots of places we could live.

But I’m ruling out anything on the equator. Granted, there are lots of places along the equator that I probably wouldn’t be so keen on even if they weren’t equatorial. The part of Congo that Joseph Conrad made famous, for example. I don’t want to live in anyplace that has “darkness” in its nickname, thank you very much. And then there are Colombia’s drug-lord stomping grounds. If I need a bodyguard, it’s out. All in all, the equator runs through some pretty dicey neighborhoods.

But that’s not my objection.

It’s the weather I object to. Not the warmth, or the sun, but the year-round sameness of it. If you live on the equator, every day is pretty much like every other. Oh sure, there are some rainy seasons and some windy spells, but nothing like an actual winter. Or a fall, or a spring. I want seasons.

I launched this site almost two years ago, in February. February is not an auspicious time to launch a site about harvesting your own food, and many of my early posts were about one of the few viable food-gathering activities available on Cape Cod in the dead of winter – shellfishing.

Winter clamming

I raked quahogs, I dug steamers, I gathered mussels. My friend Linda showed me the ropes, and often went with me in sub-freezing temperatures to break through the ice and harvest some clams.

Aside from some entry-level gardening, this was my very first experience procuring food from the world around me. The first time I raked through the sand on the sea floor and came up with an actual, genuine clam, I felt a kind of excitement that you don’t normally associate with shellfish. The very idea that you could go outside and get your own dinner!

Since then, that idea has kept us very busy. We’ve raised animals for eggs, for meat, and for honey. We’ve grown, and foraged, and fished, and hunted. We’ve procured food every which way from Sunday. But it had been a while since I’d been clamming.

Yesterday was beautiful. Bright sun, not too cold. Low tide was around noon, and I tossed my waders in the truck and headed down to Osterville. The parking lot was full of other people with the same idea, and I had to park a ways up the street.

Amy, from Natural Resources, checking my clams (they were all legal)

I suited up, plugged in my audiobook (A Dance to the Music of Time, by Anthony Powell, whose talent should dissuade just about all of us from attempting fiction), and waded out. After getting a half-peck of oysters (the limit) in about ten minutes, I went down the beach for clams. After a few exploratory rakings came up empty, I found the quahogs.

I’m better at clamming than I used to be. I also have a better rake (a Ribb Rakes Snappin’ Turtle that Kevin gave me for my birthday two years ago). But the feeling of raking food up from out of the sand is still the same.

When I did it every week, for weeks on end, that first winter, it inevitably lost some of its attraction. And that first winter, we ate a lot of clams.

This year, though, I haven’t done much clamming. I did some bullraking, to clear the clams off our oyster grant, but summer and fall kept me so busy that I don’t think I’ve been out with my peck basket and Snappin’ Turtle since about April.

Seasonality gives everything a chance, once a year, to be new again. It’s a joy that Colombian drug lords will never know.

No related posts. Yet.

It all started when my friend Chef John, uncharacteristically, made a mistake.

John’s web site, Food Wishes, is a collection of extremely good recipes. They’re straightforward and easy to follow, familiar enough to be craveable, but with an interesting spin or variation. His videos are clear and helpful and he’s smart and funny. He’s classically trained, but he never lords it over you; he just helps you master whatever technique it is that he’s using. His food is really, really good.

The best thing about Food Wishes, though, is that it makes you want to cook. I’m a big fan.

So I was surprised when, back in January, Chef John made a mistake.

He posted a clam chowder recipe, and it looked wonderful. Creamy but not viscous, with a combination of fresh and canned clams. And no cornstarch! Cornstarch is my particular chowder peeve. (I also have a chowder recipe, with a different approach – I puree onions and potato to make the base.)

No shells!

The things is, though, that John left the littlenecks in the shells. And that’s just wrong. You don’t want shells in your soup. I don’t even like them in things like Bouillabaisse, which are more stewy than soupy. It’s the cook’s job to take the clams out of the shells, thank you very much. I’m nobody’s idea of fastidious, but picking hot shellfish out of hot, soup-covered shells is simply not my idea of a dinner-table activity.

I registered my disapproval in his comments section, and he promised to give the issue a full airing at a later date.

Well, that later date has come, and I need to know what you think. Shells in soup, or no shells in soup? If enough of us weigh in, we might be able to convince John.

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We’d been doing a lot of clamming, and we’d lost tines on three rakes – one of our recreational rakes, our bull rake, and our friend Les’s bull rake, which he’d lent to us.

My rake, with all its tines

Time to make a trip to Ribb Rakes, which makes (and repairs) high-quality clam rakes.

I think you can tell a lot about a place by what sorts of businesses don’t have signs. When we lived in New York, it was the kind of after-hours clubs that served absinthe to supermodels. And there was this one restaurant in the Village, which I thought was pretty hip but, judging by the fact that I’ve been there, probably isn’t.

On Cape Cod, though, it’s the clam-rake repair shop that doesn’t have a sign. Only the cognoscenti get to rake with all their tines.

The Ribb Rakes web site has no address. The shop is on a little residential street, and there’s no indication that welding is going on, and clam rakes are being fabricated.

I don’t remember how I found out where it was (you can call, but they don’t always answer the phone). My first visit there was over a year ago, when I wrote an article on clamming for Edible Cape Cod. In it, I sang the praises of the rake Kevin had given me for by birthday – the Ribb “Snappin’ Turtle” model, a long-tined, mean-looking version that, in the article, I said looked like Freddy Krueger’s clam rake.

I hadn’t been there since, but I got us there with only one wrong turn.

We took the rakes out of the back of the truck, and the welder came out of the shop to see what we needed.

If your mental image of a welder is a big old burly guy in one of those Darth Vader helmets, you need to pay a visit to Ribb Rakes (I might even tell you where it is). The welder there is named Greta, and she’s young, and slim, and female. And although I’m no judge of a weld, people who are say she’s very good at what she does.

She does wear the Darth Vader helmet.

It was Greta who came out and said hello when we pulled into the yard. Kevin introduced himself, told her he was a newly minted oyster farmer cleaning clams off his grant, and then introduced me.

“You look familiar,” Greta said.

“I visited a while back because I did a clamming story for Edible Cape Cod,” I said, dubious that she’d remember something so far in the hazy distant past. I figured she saw me at Stop & Shop.

But I was wrong.

“That’s it.” she said. I remember you. You like the Snappin’ Turtle. Freddy Krueger’s clam rake.”

Now, a sure-fire way to make me your friend for life is to remember one of my jokes, especially if it’s over a year old.

“I can’t believe you remember that,” I told her.

“Usually, people take clam rakes much too seriously,” she said. “So I remember that.”

I like Greta. And she repaired all our rakes, overnight.

So, not only do I know where Ribb Rakes is, I have an in with the welder. From there, it’s just a hop, skip, and a jump to absinthe with supermodels.

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And the finding of them isn’t the only difficulty with steamers. Once you encounter a bona fide steamer hole, you still have to get the steamer out without breaking its shell. This isn’t easy. The rakes made for steamer digging are short handled, with tines at a right angle to the handle. You kneel on the beach, dig out the sand in front of the suspect hole, take a layer of sand off right above the suspected clam (being careful not to go too deep), and then use your hands to try and locate the steamer. Once you’ve done that, you still have to pry the thing out of the wet sand, a hospitable home he has no inclination to leave.

Digging up a steamer clam from Tamar Haspel on Vimeo.

I have only a tenuous grasp of the physical laws that account for the sucking vacuum behind a clam you’re trying to pull out of wet sand, but I have vast experience with the sucking vacuum itself. Electrolux should be so lucky.

All this by way of saying we had good reason to marvel at the two-peck haul of the guys at Bay Street.

Naturally, we struck up a conversation, hoping to wheedle their secrets out of them. One of their secrets, though, was lying in plain sight in the bed of their pick-up. It looked a lot like a toilet plunger.

“Hey,” I said, with the grace and subtlety that mark all my encounters with strangers, “What’s with the toilet plunger?”

This was one secret they were perfectly willing to share. They described how, when you get to a fertile steamer ground, you use the plunger to dig a kind of crater in the seabed (you use it under water), and the clams just drift up with with sand you displace. You scoop them up with a net, and Bob’s your uncle.

And just where was their particular fertile steamer ground? That, they weren’t telling. I understood.

Ever since then, I’ve been wanting to try the plunge method of clamming. It turns out that purveyors of shellfishing equipment actually sell something called a “clam plunger,” which looks suspiciously like a toilet plunger except that it has a longer stick and a net attached to the non-plunging end. Overall, it looked like the kind of thing we could improvise.

We have a stick. We have a net. And, of course, we have a toilet plunger.

Anyone who either knows me personally or follows this space understands that I am loath to buy anything I can cobble together out of stuff that’s lying around. The clam plunger was just begging to be cobbled. We had all the parts, and the duct tape to cobble them, but even I draw the line somewhere. Call me doctrinaire, but I think anything that’s used in the toilet should not be used in food procurement.

We bought a brand new toilet plunger, and headed out to our very own fertile steamer ground with it, stick, and net. We also brought our conventional gear, just in case.

We had discovered our steamer ground accidentally. We’d gone out for quahogs, but we kept spearing the soft-shell clams with our wicked, long-tined quahog rakes. Exactly where was that, you may ask? I’m not telling, and I know you’ll understand.

We got to our super-secret steamer spot, and Kevin waded out ankle-deep. We found an area that looked to have some steamer holes, and he started plunging. After two or three plunges, he came up empty. No clams, of course, but also no plunger. It had come off the aluminum pole and lodged itself in the sand. The threading on the end of the pole apparently wasn’t a perfect match with the threading on the inside collar of the plunger.

The same physical laws that create the sucking vacuum behind a clam apply to plungers, and it took a good deal of effort to dislodge it. Once we did, we put it back on the stick it came with, and tried again.

It works as advertised, more or less. The plunging creates a crater, and much of the sand and silt you dislodge floats away on the current. A great deal of it, though, seems to settle back in the hole, which we couldn’t make deep enough to reach the clams, which are usually about six to eight inches below the surface.

Whether the hole depth was the problem, or the clamlessness of the spot, we don’t know. We do know that we didn’t plunge up a single clam. We ditched the plunger and went back to the rakes.

Dinner, and then some

None of last year’s steamering excursions had been entirely satisfactory. The clams had been few and far between, and what there had been tended to be below legal size (two inches long). Although we’d never been completely skunked, the ratio of effort invested to clams harvested always seemed a bit high. This, our new fertile clamming ground, made for a much better experience — once we gave up on plunging. Most of the holes that looked like steamer holes proved to be just that, and Kevin and I both got much better at finding them and dislodging them without breaking their shells. Although we had a few casualties and a few shorts, we went home with five dozen steamers.

We had them for lunch, steamed and dipped in butter, accompanied by cole slaw and beer. 

It wasn’t only the clams, though, that made it such a fine morning. There were signs that winter was finally on the wane — fish were jumping, trees were budding. It was warm enough that I didn’t need a hat. The sun was out. It was a joy to be on the beach, clamming with my husband, looking forward to spring.

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Katie's first harvest

Kevin and I went clamming this morning, accompanied by our friend Katie, who is visiting from New York. It was a very satisfying experience.

Until today, I thought I was the only person on the planet who gets a thrill out of raking clams up out of the seabed, but now I know there’s at least one other. Perhaps this means that Katie and I have a low thrill threshold, or that we don’t really know what a thrill is, or maybe that we’re just inordinately fond of shellfish, but it was a joy to take someone who took so much pleasure in the activity out into the bay with us.

Katie, who is as die-hard an urbanite as I was, nevertheless appreciates what we’re trying to do here. She’s as ready to fish and lobster as she was to clam, and she’s even warming up to the chickens. She understands the pleasures of a shack in the woods – the pond, the privacy, the hammock.

But we all have to draw the line somewhere.

Logistics required us to take both our vehicles to Cotuit Bay, and Katie rode home with Kevin in the truck, with me following in the car. When we were about half a mile from home, Kevin gestured wildly out the window and pulled over to the side of the road. I followed suit, wondering what was wrong.

As I got out of the car, I heard Katie saying, a bit anxiously, “What’s the matter? What’s the matter?” She told me afterward she thought it must be either a broken axle or a dying animal.

A black-staining polypore, without a doubt

Kevin got out and ran across the road. “Did you see it?” he called back to me.

See what?

Across the road was a giant mushroom cluster. Kevin picked it up. “I think it’s a hen-of-the-wood!”

A hen-of-the-wood! I couldn’t believe he had spotted it from a moving vehicle.

When I got a close look at it, I thought it probably wasn’t a hen-of-the-wood, but it had a similar structure and it smelled very good. I was cautiously optimistic.

Katie was overtly pessimistic. “That’s poison. I’m not eating that,” she said. “Where’s the dying animal?”

We took it home and looked it up. Figures that, just days after I write about my mushroom identification problems, I find one that looks exactly like the pictures in the books. This was clearly a black-staining polypore and absolutely edible. We’ll eat it tomorrow, after Katie goes home.

Mycologist wannabe

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Clammers, though, have a different use for them. When you wade out with your rake, you need to bring a basket to contain your catch. As soon as you go beyond about ankle-deep, that basket needs to float. There are rings made for the purpose, but noodles are cheaper. You simply cut a length equal to the circumference of the top of your basket, and tie it on.

Doesn't float

That’s what we did, and went out for a trial clamming. Voila! Flotation. Well, for a while.

We miscalculated the noodle-to-clam ratio. One noodle will support about three-quarters of a peck of clams. Then, just when you think everything’s going swimmingly, you drop a clam into your basket and the whole thing sinks to the bottom.

Since we didn’t have another noodle, and stores don’t stock them in the dead of winter, we got very good at dropping our clams into the sunken basket so that a good 80% of them went in. The other 20% we had to re-clam. Clamming is hard enough the first time around. Scrounging around the sea floor for clams you’ve already caught is pretty demoralizing.

Floats!

My friend Linda, an experienced and enthusiastic clammer, understands. For my birthday (albeit belatedly), she got me a noodle, all cut up and ready to attach to my basket. To fully appreciate the value of this gift, you need to understand that, in order to get it, she had to deck the local high school swim coach, who wanted to buy out the entire stock.

Linda, her mother, and her little daughter Lily conspired to get me a gift that I needed, that I wanted, and that I was very glad to have. And, if that weren’t enough, they wrote me a poem:

Your new clam gear looks sweet from head to feet!
There’s only one problem left to defeat.
You’ve got new waders, a rake, and maybe a boat,
But that basket, when full, refuses to float!
We cut up some noodles and made you a gift.
Tie them on good so they don’t go adrift.
So, as late as we are, there’s one thing to say:
Have a happy, happy belated birthday!

Everyone should have such friends.

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Kevin out musseling

Mussels are the gateway shellfish. If you’re a little intimidated by clamming or oystering because of the expertise, special equipment, and fortitude involved, then musseling is for you. You just wait for low tide and pick the things off the rocks. Literally. Then, when you’re bolstered by your mussel success, you can move on to more challenging shelffish.

Naturally, I did this in the wrong order. I tried clamming, which is hardest, first. This resulted in an ignominious episode involving wandering around on a beach known to be clamless, on a day when clamming was forbidden, using a clam rake to dig where clams wouldn’t have been anyway. But perhaps I was lucky. If I’d done mussels first, I might never have made it to clams at all.

We were tipped off by a friend that the Cape Cod Canal was jam-packed with mussels, and we went there at low tide yesterday morning, not knowing what we’d find. We brought a wide variety of implements, from a garden trowel to a pitchfork, because we weren’t sure what we’d need to harvest the catch – assuming we could find the catch. When we got there, we left all the implements in the car as we made a reconnaissance run to see if there actually were mussels to be harvested.

The canal is bordered by large, sloping, walls of rocks, the lower parts of which are covered with seaweed and algae that can make them quite slippery. Climbing down turned out to be the hardest part of the outing, and we were amply rewarded for it. Mussels, mussels, everywhere. We had about eight pounds of them inside ten minutes. No implements were required; we picked up big clumps of them in our hands. It was as though the mussel truck had dumped them there, just for us.  (Here’s what we did with them.)

The haul

Maybe it’s because I’ve spent my entire adult life in cities, but I haven’t yet gotten over my astonishment at being able to go to the right place at the right time and pluck dinner out of the water, or the woods, or the earth. Yesterday, I was astonished all over again at the canal, at low tide.

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Linda and me with our haul. That's me on the right, in Godzilla's waders.

Shellfish have many virtues. They’re tasty and versatile, low in calories and high in minerals. They’re good raw or cooked. They freeze well. There’s really only one problem with shellfish: shells. Since oyster season opened last October, I figure Kevin and I have gone through almost 400 oysters. Every single bloody one of them had to be shucked, and I’ve finally become a competent oyster shucker. Clams, though, are another story. They just won’t give it up for me. I know I’m supposed to find their weak point, skillfully insinuate the blade of my clam knife between the shells, and then, with a deft twist, pry them open, but I’m afraid deftness has never been my long suit.

My friend Linda, though, is as deft as the day is long, and she promised to help me master clam shucking.

First, though, we needed clams. The last time we’d gone clamming, we tried Barnstable Harbor, which seems home to only large-size clams, with nary a littleneck. (How does that happen? Every clam is a small clam before it’s a large clam.  Maybe the harbor is like the gated community my in-laws live in, where residents have to be 55 and children aren’t allowed.) This time, we decided on Cotuit Bay, on the ocean side of the Cape. We first went to an area Kevin and I had successfully mined for littlenecks in the past. It was frozen over, so we headed a little north to a spot I’d never been to.

The presence of other clammers boded well, and we waded in. Three seconds later, Linda had a basket full of clams and I had nothing. Or that’s what it seemed like. But I’m used to being out-clammed by Linda, and I take it in stride. In a little under an hour, we both had a peck’s worth of clams of varying sizes, with a good portion of littlenecks.

That evening, Linda and her husband, Dan, had a few friends over to watch the Super Bowl, and I brought about two dozen of my smallest clams for a pre-game raw bar. Assuming, that is, that I could get them open.

Linda took the bowl from me and said in a low voice, “We’ll have these open in no time.”

“Why are you whispering?” I asked, automatically matching my tone to hers.

“Because you have to sneak up on them,” she told me.

I understand that, if you intend to eat them, many animals have to be snuck up on. Deer. Wild turkeys. Rabbits. But clams?  I’d always thought of them as imperturbable.

“If you scare them, they close tighter,” she explained. Aha! Whence the expression “clam up.”

This was beginning to make sense to me. My previous attempts at clam shucking had involved some pretty knocked-around clams.

I carefully set the bowl of littlenecks on the counter. Linda gently took one out, and placed it, long edge down, on the cutting board. The more curved edge of the clam, where the delineation between upper and lower shells is most obvious, faced up. She placed the clam knife blade between the shells and pushed down. The thing opened, just like that. The knife sliced through the clam, leaving half attached to the upper shell, and half attached to the lower. She cut both halves free – deftly – and handed me the clam. It was spectacular, briny and sweet.

Long years of experience trying to imitate people who are good at things has taught me that part of being good at things is making them look much easier than they actually are. Sure, when Linda does it, she opens the clam. When I do it, I slice off a fingertip. I was not sanguine as I took up the clam knife.

I picked up a clam and put it, long edge down, on the cutting board. I put the blade between the shells and pressed down.

To my astonishment, the clam simply opened. Just like that.

We set to work, and we did indeed have the whole bowl shucked in no time, except for one stubborn hold-out. I couldn’t get the thing to crack, and I gave up and handed it to Linda.

“You do the shuckin’,” I said.  “I’ll do the jivin’.”

She, of course, got it open on her first try. As she was cutting it loose from its shell, she let out a cry of astonishment.

“Look,” she said, holding up a small purple bead, about a quarter-inch in diameter, “a pearl!”

The clam pearl

And so it was. A perfectly round pearl, light purple on one side and dark purple with an eye in the middle on the other. Clams, it seems, aren’t the only reward for clamming.

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