Holly Heyser
Clamming on Block Island
The Pleasures of Wild Quahogs
By Hank Shaw
Consider the clam, which lives a quiet life in a sandy bed while the world’s eye is trained on the oyster. Chefs rhapsodize over the delicate differences between a Wellfleet oyster and a Watch Hill. But a quahog is a quahog. It is the people’s bivalve, a comforting constant from the Gulf of St. Lawrence to the Gulf Coast of Florida.
Clams are one of the finest foraged foods in the world. Chewy, salty, minerally, the northern hard-shell clam, Mercenaria mercenaria, makes a more muscular meal than the dainty oyster. It is beer to oyster’s wine, but no less versatile at the table. And it can be dug from protected seashores with little more effort than buying a license and stepping into the ocean at low tide. Clamming, which once afforded a livelihood for many, is now largely a pleasant pastime and a relaxing way to collect your supper.
Few better places exist to do it than Block Island’s Great Salt Pond. It is the central geographical feature of this 6,200-acre glacial outcropping that lies 12 miles off the coast of Rhode Island. Great Salt Pond is where I first learned to love the clam. My family summered on this island, and I have returned off and on for three decades. In my early twenties, I dug quahogs commercially in the waters off Centerport and Sayville, Long Island. In those years I ate clams several times a week, and chowder all winter long. But none of the dishes seemed as savory as the ones made from Block Island quahogs, which taste saltier because Great Salt Pond, linked directly to the open ocean, has little fresh water flowing into it and it’s shallow. Evaporation concentrates the salt. Quahogs like their water nearly twice as salty as oysters do, typically 28 to 32 parts per thousand, and the Pond hovers near the high end of that preference.
Block Island has resisted the level of development of its sister islands Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard. Many parts look as they did when the Dutch explorer Adriaen Block first spotted the place in 1614. Pheasants cackle all day in the fragrant underbrush and wading birds prowl the marshes. The island has 365 freshwater ponds — some of them just a few feet wide — and boasts some of the finest striped-bass fishing in the world. All this despite a century-old tourist trade that in summer swells the population tenfold. Clean clam beds are one of Block Island’s star attractions; legions of tourists happily pay $12 for the privilege of digging quahogs for a day or two.
Rhode Island clams enjoy several advantages. For one, the state’s fishery is almost entirely wild, although hatcheries are slowly gaining market share. And Rhode Island quahogs keep longer than those from farther south, because along this portion of Atlantic coast water temperatures are cool enough to prevent clams from falling into shock when they’re taken from the water and stored in a refrigerator. Rhody partisans say their clams are also sweeter, but that is a debatable proposition. Northern quahogs are more likely to be free of the toxin vibrio, a warm-water bacterium that makes it risky to eat a Southern clam on the half-shell, especially in summer.
And it is on the half-shell that quahogs shine brightest. That’s the way I ate my first one, dug from Great Salt Pond on an August afternoon in 1976. Unexpectedly, that day we hauled in several hundred. Not knowing what to do with them all, my stepfather and his friend Big Al began to shuck and eat them raw, a sight I found horrifying. Then the two men questioned whether I had the guts to join them, so I began to shuck and eat too. I ate dozens. My sisters remember my belly being so taut they thought it might burst. I just remember being happy.
In the years since, virtually all the quahogs I’ve collected for myself I’ve eaten within a day. But I did store some clams back when I dug them commercially. I’d bring home a bucket of seawater, empty the vegetable drawer of the fridge, coat the bottom of the drawer with cornmeal, fill it with the seawater, and drop the quahogs in. After a few days, the clams would filter in the cornmeal and filter out the grit. Even a New York clam dug in summer will last more than a week this way.
Many of the clams I and my fellow baymen dug off Sayville were raised in a hatchery in East Islip, on the Great South Bay. It’s easy to spot a hatchery quahog: check for a telltale striation on its shell that looks like an electrocardiogram and is called notata. It’s a genetic oddity hatcheries use to mark their product. Most of the quahogs sold in New York, Connecticut and New Jersey started life in a tank on shore. Even many of Block Island’s finest restaurants buy Connecticut quahogs bearing the notata. But hatchery clams do not suffer the same loss of flavor or pose the same environmental problems as farm-raised fish. Once the clams grow about as big as a fingernail, they’re dumped over natural clam beds and spend the rest of their lives alongside their wild cousins. They are then dug the same way as wild quahogs.
Some clammers in Virginia, Florida, and elsewhere go a step further and produce a third category of clam. They culture quahogs similar to the way many oyster farmers culture oysters. The clams live on protected stretches of the bottom, packed together inside plastic mesh. Some farmers bury four-by-four-foot mesh boxes they later haul up, while others set out long rows of mesh-protected clams the way terrestrial growers place floating row covers over vegetables. Set in areas with ideal salinity and bottom composition, and with no crabs or predatory mollusks to attack them, these quahogs grow fast. But they lack the shelf life of a wild quahog, according to John Kraeuter of the Haskins Shellfish Research Lab at Rutgers University in New Jersey, who has studied Mercenaria mercenaria for more than 30 years. Kraeuter thinks the short shelf life is due to the optimal conditions that give cultured quahogs a hyped-up metabolism; the candle that burns twice as bright burns half as long.
Kraeuter has eaten wild, hatchery, and cultured quahogs from many states; he says he can’t discern any difference in taste. “But if you’d put them together side by side, you’d notice something,” he said. “Because they are a filter-feeder, they’re going to reflect the area in which they’re grown. There’s going to be a subtle difference.” For clams, there’s no equivalent to the Grand Central Oyster Bar in New York City, no place where you can eat and compare Block Island, Indian River, and Barnegat Bay quahogs alongside each other. Maybe there should be.
Wild, hatchery, or cultured, a clam typically lives four to eight years, because diners prefer their quahogs two to three inches wide. These are called littlenecks after Little Neck on Long Island’s North Shore. Kraeuter says that most cultured clams are sold as “necks,” which are suited to eating raw or in the various vongole sauces that are a specialty of Rhode Island’s Italian community. A slightly larger littleneck is called a top neck. Allowed to grow a bit bigger, a littleneck becomes a cherrystone, which is still tasty on the half-shell but for some is too large and chewy a mouthful. Cherrystones are best eaten steamed or broiled. They are the perfect clam to cook and serve in the shell.
A quahog’s goal in life is to grow beyond four inches, at which point it is big enough and thick-shelled enough to be almost immune to animal predators. Coincidentally, at this size it also gets elevated by humans to “chowder” status. Chowder clams bring the lowest price, and for primacy in making chowder they compete with the surf clam, Spisula solidissima. Surfs are sweeter but tend to be gritty, although their large adductor muscle makes an excellent substitute for a bay scallop. At least one Block Island clammer prefers surf clams for his chowder. My mother sticks with quahogs, which she runs through a grinder, cooking them with the traditional salt pork and at the end adding heavy cream, which must never boil.
Regardless of how it is prepared, a cooked clam tightens up and loses much of its slipperiness, acquiring a texture reminiscent of close-grained meat, such as heart or gizzard. That’s one fundamental culinary difference between a clam and an oyster, and it occurs because, unlike oysters, clams move around with a muscle known as the foot.
Last summer I returned to Block Island’s Great Salt Pond. It had been six years since I’d been to the island, and it was good to be back. I stood alongside my girlfriend calf-deep in the cove, screwing my feet into the muddy sand, my toes searching for clams. I touched something cool and hard but irregular, a rock. I took a step forward and twisted again. This time I immediately felt a rounder object just under the surface. I held it with my toes, reached down, and grabbed it. It was a quahog, but a young one, not much bigger than a quarter. I reburied it.
I took another step and kept digging; my toes located another clam. This one was large enough to not slip through the aluminum measuring gauge the harbormaster had provided me along with a license. The clam was a keeper. After six years, I was not about to wait any longer than I had to for a taste of a quahog on the half-shell. I’d brought my clam knife, a primitive thing with a stout blunt blade about three inches long. I wedged the blade into the hinge of the clam, buried in the pit of my palm. A quick twist, and my hand was doused with brine from inside the quahog. I slipped the blade above and below the meat to free it from the shell, and slurped it down. Cool, a bit metallic, slippery and very, very salty. The clam’s pleasing chewiness wasn’t diminished by the inevitable bit of grit; clams feed by filtering plankton from their surroundings and often have sand lodged within them. I tossed the empty shell into the sea, dug again, and found another clam. In short order we had a dozen in the one-gallon ziplock bag I’d brought to collect them. We kept digging.
I was pleased to find that my toes quickly relearned not only what a clam feels like but what a legal-sized clam feels like. I also remembered to avoid crabs, especially the spiny horseshoe crabs that can grow as big as a hard hat. The clamming was as good as I remembered it being 30 years ago. We filled our bag in less than two hours and headed back to cook the clams. Along the way I picked a small branch from a bayberry bush; it can be used in the same way as European bay laurel, but its aroma is sweeter, more floral.
Arriving at the rambling, Gothic-style inn where we were staying, I built a driftwood fire in the barbecue and set an old aluminum stockpot on the grill. I added half a stick of butter, half a bottle of Albariño wine, the bayberry, and all the clams, then covered the pot. Nothing remained but to watch the tide return on Crescent Beach and wait for the clams to open. As soon as they’re open, they’re ready; not before, not after. An overcooked clam becomes a nasty glob of rubber.
When they finally opened, it was twilight and we were starving. Bayberry had mixed with driftwood smoke to perfume the clams, which had spilled their salty liquor into the wine and butter. We didn’t talk much as we ate clam after clam after clam. We finished the wine, then a loaf of Portuguese bread, and still there were more clams. When we were done, I counted the shells; we’d eaten seventy-five.
As happy as I was that we had gorged ourselves the way I’d done long ago, I was happier that all it still required was a few dollars, a plastic bag and strong ankles. (Oysters be damned.) ●
From issue 78
