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On the East Coast, the quahog is queen, shucked and swimming in its own brine on ice at raw bars, stewed in chowders , baked in the shell, steamed in a wine-rich broth, or made into a sauce that gets tossed with linguine. When plucked from their shells, clams might not win any beauty contests, but their briny bite and bouncy chew create a covetable combination that works in a wide variety of dishes in cuisines around the world. As filter feeders, clams even help clean up their environment, clearing out any toxins from the water as they bubble about in tidal flats and dig deep into beaches with their powerful muscles.
Those muscles—and what they do—gave the mollusk its name. That, unfortunately, is about as close as we can get to defining what a clam is or isn't. The Oxford Companion to Food points out that, while the name should refer only to bivalves that can close their shells completely, this definition actually eliminates a few accepted clam types razors, for example and includes oysters and mussels.
We know from the piles of ancient shell remains lining coasts around the world that clams have been eaten for centuries, if not millenia. And for good reason: they are abundant, tasty, and healthful full of iron and vitamin B. Most of the time, though, clams in the US are edible, as the Europeans landing on New World shores learned quickly from indigenous peoples, who had long been eating a version of what is now known as clam chowder.
But we here in the US do miss out on a few international species. The FDA bans importation of blood clams from Southeast Asia, as their low-oxygen environments can make them carriers of diseases like hepatitis and typhoid. They can occasionally be found in New England, though, and can be imported from Mexico. Shijimi, a brackishwater Japanese clam thought to be a hangover cure and often used in miso soup, is classified as an invasive species in the US and is rarely found other than in packaged miso soups or frozen.
Some will even offer instructions on how to forage for them and have recipes for the local species. Contrary to popular belief, though, if a clam does not open during the cooking process, it doesn't indicate anything is wrong. As Daniel has pointed out : "A shut-tight clam is, if anything, the most vigorous and lively one in the pot.
If you forage the clams yourself, you want to purge them by scrubbing them and then soaking them in clean, sand-free seawater for about half an hour.
This will help keep your clam dishes grit-free. While most fishmongers will purge clams for sale, purging them again in salted water to make sure will save you the extraordinary terrible-ness of biting into a gritty clam. The Narragansett tribe of Native Americans waded and dove for these clams, which dominate the clam-scape of the East Coast.
They called the local mollusk poquauhock , which morphed into "quahog" as it entered the English language. The scientific name mercenaria comes from the Latin word for "pay," the same root as the word mercenary, for their use as wampum see above.
Our West Coast vendors harvest the shellfish, pack the shellfish so they stay fresh for the next 24 hours, drop it off at a freight forwarder, and get it on a plane direct to Boston. We then pick it up at the airport and make sure all the shellfish are strong and alive, and if not, they visit our wet storage system for a drink of water before being packed and shipped to our customers.
Like many other bivalves, manila clams are summer spawners because of the warmer water temperatures. When bivalves spawn, most of their energy gets channeled into reproducing, so it takes a few weeks for them to regain their strength. The meats are unaffected, but the strength of their abductor muscles to stay closed decreases.
Unfortunately, harvesters are unable to detect spawning clams, so weak clams can easily end up in a shipment to Boston. We try to nurse the live ones back to health in our wet storage before shipping them to our customers, but there's nothing we can do about the dead except mourn them and apologize to our customers about an unfulfilled order.
If they do survive the flight, we recommend that our customers ice the heck out of them. Shelf life of manila clams decreases dramatically in their weakened state, so keeping them cool will help with their survival.
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