The Waterbury Democrat., 1946-08-16
The Firing Line By D. N. T.
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

am just now back from a clam. bake, given at the Grove under tht auspices of the Loyal Order of Dis loyalists, national organization dedicated to the prevention of the use of tripe as waffle irons. It should be dedicated to the prevention ot clambakes.
 At four dollars the copy, ate the same clans, corn, lobster, chicken potatoes and other inevitables that I used to consume for one dollar back in those distant days when l first started going to clambakes The taste had not changed in any way, however, in spite of the price The chicken tasted like corn, the corn tasted like clans, the clans tasted like lobster, the lobster tasted like potatoes, the potatoes tasted like corn, chicken, lobster, cfams and inevitables.
 You take an ordinary clam, good steamer and I like it. The ear of corn picked five minutes before it was plopped into pot of bubbling water, aWash in butter and suitably seasoned with salt and pepper, is without parallel in all the annals of gust A chicken, fried in pressure cooker and suitably garbed in cream gravy, is a dish for the gods. And what can compare to lobster, stuff ed by knowing man and nicely broil- ed? Potatoes, too, have their sound though mores pedestrian points And I have eaten inevitables that would make General Sherman's statue water at the mouth.
 Separately, these various viands are nectar and it's more substantial counterparts But taken together and mixed helter-Skelter into the chaos of a clambake, they. are an offenSe to the discriminating palate, an abomination to the traditions of cookery They talk about this kind of bake and that kind of bake and some other kind of bake, but they're all alike. Nothing is baked" It is all done to death in boiling water, from the pallid, slipping skin of the chicken to the slug-like potato that they plank on your plate. Overall is the pervasive disturbing odor of seaweed, with an occasional strand of the stuff lurking in the comesti- bles to give more tangible evidence of it's presence.
 I read somewhere, and I think it was in the Readers Digest cut of the Saturday Evening Post, about the discovery of the clambake. By the white man, that is. Some white colonials happened on sullen knot of feeding Redskins on some Rhode Island beach many, many years ago. The Redskins induced them to par take of the strange fare on the sands, with a fine show of genial ity that only could have been subtle manifestation of the we'll known Indian vile.
 These colonials gnawed on the edibles presented and were, as far as is known, the first Caucasian to sink their teth in a clambake. What they did not know was this:
 Those Indians were fully aware that the whites would approach then some day. So they decided to be ready for them. They laid cun- ming trap in the form of a six-foot square hole dug in the sand, prop erly stoked, and filled with such food as the testy aborigines used to feed vicious dogs that they wanted to do away with without offending the tribal gods who watched over the canine element. What could be worse, ugh, they asked each other" than chicken, Holsters, sweet corn, clans, potatoes and inevitables, all compound / en masse, wrapped in lethal SeaWeed, and cooked to- gether wet, wet, Wet?"
 But they were too smart for their breechclouts. They forgot gen. erous complement of beer, without which no biped can safely weather clambake. The colonials just hap pened to have couple hogsheads of beer with them - and they brought away pleasant memories of the clambake that have been hand ed down from generation to gen. eration to this day. And someone, SOMEONE, MT. Editor, also brought along box of bicarb. They lived o. E. D.
 ANXIOUS