I liked New England.
But when that smoking chowder came in, the mystery was delightfully explained. Oh! sweet friends, hearken to me. It was made of small juicy clams, scarcely bigger than hazel nuts, mixed with pounded ship biscuits and salted pork cut up into little flakes! the whole enriched with butter, and plentifully seasoned with pepper and salt... we dispatched it with great expedition.
Tender and sweet, Manila clams partner well with a wide variety of foods - white wine, sake, beer, butter, leeks, fresh herbs, roasted peppers, olives, and wild mushrooms, to name a few.
I particularly like to make crunchy slices of garlic bread to serve with steamed clams.
My favorite way to cook a clam is in chowder. I was a New Yorker for 20 years, and I always loved tomato-based, celery-heavy Manhattan chowders.
I make a wicked clam chowdah, and linguine with clam sauce. Oysters I like to eat raw, and mussels in either a white wine sauce or in beer with paprika.
Today we take New England clam chowder as something traditional that makes our roots as American cooking very solid, with a lot of foundation. But the first person who decided to mix potatoes and clams and bacon and cream, in his own way 100 to 200 years ago, was a modernist.
Littlenecks and cherrystones are chewy and sweet on the half shell with mignonette, served raw. But a well-cooked clam is a toothsome, tender thing, full of that magical stuff known as clam liquor.
New England clam chowder, made as it should be, is a dish to preach about, to chant praises and sing hymns and burn incense before. [...] It is as American as the Stars and Stripes, as patriotic as the national Anthem. It is Yankee Doodle in a kettle.
