A Clammer’s Wife Cooks Clams
By: Jean Anne Feldeisen
Tags: Work, Seafood, Small Business, Cooking, Aquaculture

A Clammer’s Wife Cooks Clams

And this is what we ate

Photo courtesy of the author

Our life in New Jersey, revolved, to a large extent, around the hardshell clam, Mercenaria mercenaria. My husband, Don, was a clammer, had worked for himself in Great Bay in southern New Jersey since the age of thirteen when he and his twin brother bought a boat and went out to catch and sell clams. He did that for the next forty years.

I love to eat clams, and if you know anything about my mother, Mildred, you’d know she loves clams more than any food in the world. She grew up eating seafood from the local waters, as the men in her family were baymen as well. So when Donnie became attached to me, he began to woo my mother and the rest of my family with clams. The flow of clams in my life began at age 15 or so and didn’t stop until we moved to Maine.

My husband was a commercial fisherman in Atlantic County, New Jersey. Over the years, Don caught clams in all possible ways. He “treaded” clams in the shallow waters with his feet. To do this you ”get overboard” wearing a wetsuit, ideally, to keep bugs off. Then you feel the clams with your feet, and either pick them up with your toes and flip them up to your hand to toss in a basket that’s floating in inner tube. Some people slide them up the other leg or just bend down and pick them up which is slower. This was most exciting when you got ”bumped” by a shark or sting ray”. The water was shallow enough that the small sand sharks couldn’t move very well and weren’t really dangerous.

At other times he used tongs or scratchrakes or Shinnecock rakes out of his boat to dig clams out of the mud, hauling on the handle-20 to 30 feet worth-to bring the metal basket of clams into the boat.

In winter, if conditions we’re right he would break the ice to go out into the bay where the water wasn’t frozen. Or, if there was plenty of ice, cut a hole down through it to get clams. In the picture below Don was working in 18 inches of ice.

Photo courtesy of the author

I would get into the water myself to pick up clams, though I never developed any decent technique. When we were newly married, I would often go out with Don and count the clams and bag them as he brought them up. But the main thing I did with clams was cook with them.

If he brought home clams, Don would open a few dozen for me to make a quick clam spaghetti or fritters for supper. If we wanted chowder I’d need more- 30 or 50. 100 for a big batch of deviled clams in the shells.

Don often brought home other interesting catches from his work. Sometimes he would find a patch where the mussels were thick and stop to harvest a bunch of them. Other times he’d see the birds working an area and stop to catch a fish on the way home. Then I cooked that stuff for supper.

There were giant clams called “Chowders” with which I made chowder, fritters, stew, pies, cakes, etc. There were cherrystones that you ate on the half shell. And “nicks” or littlenecks, which were small and very expensive, for a time and were usually served steamed in a big pot.,

In the seventies we became interested in aquaculture and spent some time in Virginia studying with scientists growing clams, and the algae to feed them, at the University of Virginia’s Wachapreague location.

Back in New Jersey, after several unsuccessful starts, we became part owners of a clam hatchery. There we kept the male and female clams in separate bowls, encouraged them to spawn by raising and lowering the water temperature, then caught and cared for their microscopic young, feeding them algae we grew. Later they were transferred to raceways of running water until they were big enough to put into the bay under screens. They grew there until they became large enough to sell.

Clams were our livelihood, the only one we had while I mostly raised our daughter and sorted out what I wanted to do for a career. Besides that, we ate them a lot. Don and I both loved clams and all the products I could make from them. I think our daughter had more than her fill of them, for sure.

During this time, I accumulated quite a few recipes for clams. And one weekend, I determined to test them all out on a group of our friends and had a clam feast. I don’t quite remember all that I made for that party. But if I had to make a clam menu for a clam buffet, here is what I could include:

A few simple things like Clam Stew, Clams on the Half shell, Steamed Clams, Clam Cakes, Fried Clams, and ”Clam Hurry Up”, a kind of clam hash with potatoes and onions.

Some fancier things such as Deviled Clams, Clam Pie, Clam Spaghetti, Clam Fritters, Clam Chowder, White Pizza with clams and garlic, Steamed Clams with Garlic and Herbs, Clam Spaghetti with tiny clams, tomatoes, and bacon, and many more.

Of course there are many variations of each of these recipes, according to who’s cooking. You can do a lot with a clam. And they were a good way to feed our family. I taught my mother-in-law the Clam Spaghetti recipe I got from Aunt Jean. I made clam fritters for breakfast for our friends. I used my grandmother, Minnie’s, recipe for chowder and sold an awful lot of it to customers during my catering years.

Because this is an old chowder recipe, it is a bit different from many of those you see in New Jersey, and not at all like a New England clam chowder. It is not really either red or white. But it tastes like clams, just the way my family wants it. So I’m sharing that with you here.

Minnie’s Clam Chowder

This recipe uses about 25–30 large chowder clams to make a soup pot of chowder.

Begin by frying out a few pieces of bacon or salt pork, along with a few tablespoons butter in a large heavy pot. Add one large or two medium onions, finely chopped. Add a bay leaf, a heaping teaspoon of celery seed, freshly ground black pepper. Add just a little salt to cook with the potatoes as the clams will make the mixture quite salty.

Peel and dice 6–8 potatoes, add them to the onions, and cover them with water. Bring to boil and simmer until potatoes are just tender. Add a bit more water, as needed, to keep the potatoes covered.

Meanwhile,

Open the clams, reserving all the juice, and rinse carefully in their juice to remove bits of shell or sand. Then grind them in a meat grinder or cut by hand. (I use a food processor, pulsing a few times). Strain the juice before using it.

Add the chopped clams and the juice which has been strained. You are aiming to have about half of the mixture be potatoes and water, half clams and clam juice, so you see this chowder will be quite “clammy” flavored, which is as it should be.

Bring to a simmer to cook the clams. Then add a few tablespoons tomato paste, or a few peeled, seeded and chopped fresh tomatoes, or a little tomato sauce. This should give it only a slightly reddish color. Like I said, this is neither red nor white clam chowder. In fact, it comes from New Gretna, New Jersey and is a clammer’s chowder, full of the taste of these briny bivalves. I hope you enjoy it.

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Jean Anne Feldeisen is a therapist, writer, cook and cookbook reader. She writes about cooking, food, books and aging well. Jean has been reading and writing poetry since age 5. The memoir Dear Milly is her first book. She is seventy plus years old and just getting started.