32: One more short digression . . .
32: One more short digression . . .
Little Follies, “Do Clams Bite?” Chapters 12 and 13
12
ONE MORE SHORT DIGRESSION, this time on the sizes of clams. When the day’s clamming is over, the clammy culls the clams, sorting them by size. There are four sizes of Mercenaria mercenaria in the wild: seeds, littlenecks, cherrystones, and chowder clams.
If you have an adult hand and close your thumb and forefinger to make an oval, you will have defined the approximate size of a littleneck. Littlenecks are the youngest, tenderest of the legal sizes. They should be eaten as they are, raw, or cooked only very briefly. No one with a sense of the fitness of things would ever use them for chowder. Anything smaller than a littleneck is a seed, a clam too young to take. The culler should throw those back into the bay, but many a clammy will tell you that the little ones go very nicely as a snack with a beer. The shells of littlenecks have few practical uses, but they are perfect for crafting handsome whatnots to fill the shelves in your living room, and they make nice jewelry.
If you form another oval with your thumb and forefinger, leaving a gap of about an inch this time, you will have defined the upper limit of a cherrystone. Cherrystones are good for everything. You can eat them raw or steam them or use them in a sauce for pasta, and you can use them in chowder if you’re expecting company, elegant company: tall, slim men in dinner jackets, long-stemmed and angular women in silk. The shells are really a little large for earrings, and a little small for ashtrays, unless you’re having an elegant little dinner party with the people mentioned above. Most cherrystone shells end up as driveway topping, but quite a few are made into knickknacks and whatnots by people who have somewhat larger knickknack or whatnot shelves than the people who make their knickknacks and whatnots from littleneck shells.
Anything larger than a cherrystone is a chowder clam, and as its name suggests, it is really only good for chowder, and only everyday chowder at that. Now everyday chowder is nothing to sneer at, and there are many occasions when it is just the thing—cold, blustery, rainy days, for instance. Many clam fanciers consider chowder clams the most flavorful and littlenecks almost insipid; others, of course, find the littlenecks sweet and subtle and think that a mouthful of chowder clam is a lot like a mouthful of rubber bands. The shells of chowder clams are widely used as ashtrays.
At Corinne’s Fabulous Fruits of the Sea, one of the places where I conduct my research, Porky White, slurping down a few necks flavored with some pepper and lemon one night, said to me, “You know, they’re a lot like women, clams. The older ones are kinda tough and wily, but they have real flavor. Those in their prime are sort of the standard, the ideal, but since they’re what most people want, the real connoisseur generally wants something else. Now the younger ones, well, they are tenderer, and there are times when tenderness is all, but after a few you find yourself wanting something that you can chew on. And the ones that are too young are a guilty pleasure; you know that you shouldn’t even consider them, but every once in a while, when no one’s looking—”
The pepper must have gotten to him. He broke off and blew his nose in his napkin.
13
GRANDFATHER slipped over the side and into the water. My father stood around with his hands in his pockets, whistling and looking out over the water at the islands.
I sat in the stern, with my legs dangling, playing my game with the surface of the water again, hoping that, since Grandfather had my father to clam with him, I might go unnoticed and not have to get into the water at all.
“Bert,” called Grandfather, “are you going to dig some clams?”
“Oh, yeah,” said my father. “I was just looking at the islands and wondering how they were formed. Do you ever wonder about that?”
“Nope,” said Grandfather
“They probably started out as just sand bars, wouldn’t you say?”
“Probably,” said Grandfather.
“And then they grew, little by little.”
“Guess so,” said Grandfather.
My father seemed to have run out of things to say about the islands. He began unbuttoning his shirt, slowly. He spotted me in the stern. “Hey, Peter,” he said. “Let’s get a move on. Let’s not sit around. I want to see you in the water. You must be quite a little clammer by now.”
I gave him a sickly grin and started unbuttoning my shirt, more slowly than he. Unbuttoning one’s shirt, removing one’s trousers, adjusting the string tie on one’s little woolen bathing suit—these are tasks that one can’t stretch out forever. Eventually my father and I were ready to get into the water. We let ourselves over the side.
I stood near Rambunctious, in water up to my shoulders, watching Grandfather, standing in water up to his waist, shuffling along with short steps, probing the sand with his toes. When he felt a clam, he would duck beneath the surface and scoop it out of the sand. He’d bring it up and drop it into the front of his snug wool suit. Slowly, reluctantly, I began an imitation of his shuffle. I was scared to death: with my father and my grandfather both watching me, today was going to have to be the day.
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