1 of 3
2 of 3
3 of 3
Let’s put it this way: Many New Englander couples use the back of their wedding licenses to record important dates in the life of the marriage. On the backside of Lawrence “Chubby” and Bessie Woodman’s license, just below the birth dates of their two boys, is the notation from 3 July, 1916: “We fried the first clam.”
There are Serious Foods. Then there are Serious Foods. Fried clams are the latter. If there are any foods any more serious than fried clams, it would probably make us too hungry to think about them and we’d get distracted trying to explain them.
Fried clams are, moreover, iconic foods. You want to experience New England? The real New England? Go to Essex County, just north of Boston, to Woodman’s. Or to the Clam Box. Or to J. T. Farnham’s. Go to any of the clam shacks so close by the salt marsh you get a whiff of low tide along with the fragrance of hot frying oil as you stand in line—and there will be lines, pal—waiting to get to the counter.
Sit down at any of those places to a plate of fried clams. And by “plate” we mean a paper tub; no clam shack worth its stratospheric sodium count will serve clams on anything more elaborate. An Essex County summer evening spent working your way through a heaping helping of those little golden jewels, with a stack of fries and onion rings on the side, is not only to experience the essence of New England, it is as close to Heaven as any dining experience can ever take you.
Long before the colonists showed up in what would become New England, early natives there left middens. Middens are massive piles of empty clamshells, proof these people were either gobbling clams as fast as they could haul them out of the tidal mudflats, or the middens were actually three-dimensional artistic expressions of primitivist intertextual semiotics (It’s possible; the Wampanoags were very into that stuff.)
Later on, French explorers discovered clams were better in their cream-based stews than anything they had in France and clam chowder became the glory that it is.
Here’s how good steamed clams or clam chowder are: it took more than two centuries of eating both before anyone got tired of them enough to give any thought to a different preparation. And even then it was, legend has it, a mistake. Or more properly a “hey, let’s see what’d happen if we…” kind of moment. Specifically, it took one Chubby Woodman (below), who’d opened a steamed clam and potato chip joint, right on the estuary in Essex.
(Woodman’s also had—still does—ice cream. Ice cream in New England—coffee and maple cream are local favorites—is recognized as a food group.)
That summer day in 1916, one of Chubby’s pals, on a whim, suggested dropping some clams into the hot potato chip oil. Just to see what they’d taste like. What they tasted like was the best day Woodman’s had ever had: $35 worth, which in 1916 dollars was roughly equivalent to the national debt. By the end of the season they were selling more than 1500 fried clams a day and it’s only gotten better.
Compared to what Chubby did that day on a whim, the accidental discoveries of penicillin, Teflon, and radioactivity are all, by comparison, footnote trivia.
The recipe Chubby created, with clams rolled in evaporated milk, flour and cornmeal, was created that same day; it has not changed and remains, essentially, the same, all up and down the New England coast. You could stir it up in your kitchen. Here’s what you couldn’t get, though: Ipswich clams.
Ipswich clams don’t all come out of the beaches around Ipswich, Massachusetts from which they take their name. Their home is an area that’s part of the Great Marsh, one that covers the top half of Cape Ann in Massachusetts, up into the suburban front yard size piece of beach that is all New Hampshire has of the North Atlantic. Or, in in terms we prefer, the ancestral range of the Ipswich clam is from roughly the Ipswich Clam Bake Company in Ipswich to Larry’s Clam Bar in Newburyport.
Ipswich clams can come from several tidal flat regions all over that part of the coast, all the way up into Maine. They are defined not by geography but by the gout a terroir they call home. (Note: do not use the term “gout a terroir” in any of the clam places we have mentioned above.) Unlike many other bivalves, Ipswich clams live not in sand but in muddy flats. The salty mud turns the clam shells dark; more importantly ingredients in the mud lend a definite sweetness to the clam’s meat, especially to their big, fat bellies.
“Fried clams,” in the Midwest, is practically synonymous with “clam strips.” These are necks—siphons, actually—scrawny, fried so long they’re reduced to vaguely clam-flavored rubber bands. Howard Johnson restaurants practically built their empire on these. Real fried clams are the whole clams, including those sweet, juicy bellies.
Now, here’s the thing: Ipswich clams spend their entire lives siphoning algae. Their bellies are gorged with it. It is the same algae from which the green “seaweed” of wrapped sushi is made. Still, even coated with that beautiful crispy batter, you can see what was the last meal of your clam—which is about to be your next bite. While it is possible this may discomfit picky eaters, you must admit there’s a nice symmetry there. In any case, the whole clam is absolutely essential to a plate of fried clams. And it cannot be just any clam. It must be one of those soft-shelled beauties, dug out of the mud flats.
That’s why we perked up when we saw “Fried Ipswich Clams” on the menu at 801 Fish in Clayton—and why we ordered them with such trepidation. It’s easy to mess up fried clams; damnably difficult to get them right. Were they perfect? No. They were excellent; as close to the fried clams of Essex County as any we have ever tasted and certainly the best we’ve had that were not served in a paper tub. We could have made a meal of them, but it was our job to review as much of the menu as we could—our editor did not think readers would enjoy reading 500 words or so just about fried clams. That’s why we’ve done it here.
801 Fish’s fried clams could be better. But that would require piping in some of the onshore breezes from the estuaries of the North Atlantic, and serving ice cream next door, and having the Red Sox playing on the restaurant’s TV. And while 801 just might be talked into salting their air and adding maple cream ice cream to the menu, we’re pretty sure even a place as serious about seafood as this one would, in St. Louis anyway, draw the line on airing Sox games.
Pity.
Editor's note: Dave Lowry sampled a lot more than the clams at 801 Fish. Read his complete review in this month's St. Louis Magazine, here.
