Blog the Forty-fourth

Me on Clams

I begin this post, in Scholastic fashion, with objections to my writing it, and then answers to my objections.

First Objection

I'm not partial to clams. I've always been glad to eat them when others make them, but I haven't been much inclined to make them for others. When I have, it has been from the duty of the moment, in obedience to the culinary imperative, If it can be eaten, it must be cooked.  However, is knowledge to be trusted where there is not love?  For does not the Apostle write, If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but have not love, I am only a resounding gong or clanging cymbal. And again, If I can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, but have not love? Now, love goes out to delight in its object, whereas knowledge takes it in. Accordingly, whether it be the love that loves to cook clams or the love that loves to eat them, where its love is lacking, can the tongue be trusted to speak true?

Second Objection

Contrary to the injunction of the same Apostle, I cannot be trusted not to mention things that ought not to be mentioned among us. Again, contrary to the dictum of the Philosopher that all knowledge is desirable, I have acquired knowledge I find undesirable but must in conscience mention to you anyway. You cannot trust shame to keep me from confessing it to you: I tell you, my shame is not to be trusted. I bid you turn around, gentle Reader, and go back to shore. Do not dive with me into turgid waters to discover of clams what, once known, can never be unknown. If you prove to be of weak conscience, my undesirable knowledge may not only wound your conscience but destroy your appetite.

On the contrary

However, granted I am not to be trusted, I say that others may, to wit, my people and God.

To the first objection: I'm perplexed, even perturbed, when people say to me "your mushrooms" or "your cabbage dish" or "your frittata".  Mine?  These recipes are not mine. When you belong to a people, there is no mine and thine, just ours. Being born to it, you have neither credit nor ressponsibililty for what your people cooks. To be sure, you may be well-born or base-born. However, that's not personal virtue or vice, but rather original, being a matter of your origin, not your choice. Be it good or ill, your origin is not about you, it's about your people.  You're just born to them, fortunately or not.

Now, my people love clams. And other peoples love my people's clams. So, you can trust my people's love, even if not my own. I know what clams taste like when they taste good, and when they don't. I know when I've pleased those whom they please. You can trust me on that because you can trust my people. 

More, trust God, who has written his recipes on the natures of things. In the beginning, God gave Adam the animals to name and to govern, for him to discern the good of each creature. When afterward God gave to Noah the animals for food, he entrusted to human discernment the good use of each. To make the right use of each creature, you have first to discern its native charism, God's gift to it. 

And a good recipe for it is God's gift to us. Wherever, whenever, and by whatever people uncovered, it is a recipe of the Creator's written into the nature of the edibles before us—for those who have eyes to see and tongues to taste. Why do not all human eyes alike see, all tongues alike taste the goodness of God? Because the eyes and palate of human appetite are clouded by the concupiscence of the flesh, the concupiscence of the eyes, and the pride of life, to wit: comfort food, gourmet food, and health food.

A food will teach you how to cook it by its look, smell, taste, even by its sound cooking, if you but heed it. If you wrest a clam from a shell and mix it with mixings twice its bulk—cheese and spinach and devil-knows-what—you smother its voice. It may be worthy a Rockefeller, but not its Creator. At the other extreme, if all you're going to do is steam it, how's that cooking it? Might as well eat it raw.  When a clam is cooked right, it will taste more like a clam than before it was cooked. From under the bushel of its rawness, its God-given pearl will beam. 

Okay, so what's your problem with clams, you ask me?  What's so unmentionable about them?  What is the scandalous confession of my Second Objection to myself? 

Well, gentle Reader, you know that I'm a committed omnivore.  You know too that in my post on roasting a fish whole, I made it a matter of moral integrity that you look your dinner in the eye, in gratitude for its giving up its life for yours. But, truth be told, I confess that I have never had to myself kill my dinner before. And I was doing it before I knew it, so I hadn't the time to screw myself up morally for the recognition. I was horrified when my eyes were opened to what my hands were doing.

You see, clam cadavers don't taste good long dead, turns out.  Clams in cans, or jars, or frozen packets, aren't even worthy a Rockerfeller, let alone their Creator.  Clams have to be freshly killed to taste good. At the fishmonger's in Brooklyn, there are guys in the back who will do the deed for you, for a tip. You just hand your clams over the counter and put a tip in the jar, and soon enough they reappear shucked, floating in their clam juices in a plastic container, accompanied by their shells in a plastic bag.  It never occurred to me to wonder what went on behind that counter.  

Well, it turns out to be somewhat merciless. You see, the Gentile shuckers at the one fish-market in the fish-town of my exile want 50 cents each to shuck a clam for you, or $6 for a dozen (well in excess of a good Brooklyn tip), and they make you wait a long time, no less, for a mere dozen.  I went along with this tip-gouging very grudgingly, until Covid came along and prohibited shucking in the shop.  So, one of the guys showed me how to do it and sold me a 50-cent shucking knife for $15 so I could do it for myself at home.  Well, the challenge of it is that the clam is shut tight as a clam (and if it isn't, you should throw it away), and you have to learn how to wedge that shucking knife into the crevice to pry the shell open. Then you scrape all the meat off the shells. 

Wait, the meat?  Isn't the meat in fact an animal?  In fact, isn't it a live animal?  O.M.G.!  And isn't that animal gripping its shell tight against the predator that is me intent on devouring it? And when me finally manages to slip me knife far enough into the shell that it suddenly releases and opens, isn't it because I've cut the clam's death-grip on its backbone?  Isn't it still alive when I'm scraping it from the habitation of its own miraculous making?  

In a word, Yes. To cook clams right, you have to mangle them alive, with your own bare hands, or else engage another to do your mangling for a tip while you wait.  There's the horror of it.  Now you know.  

I feel like Eve after she gave Adam the fruit to eat too: at least now I have someone else to be ashamed with.

On How to Mangle Your Clams Alive

I feel like I have to keep saying to you mangling them alive in order to own up morally to what you must do. The idea of confession is to say your sin aloud to another so as to own up to it—except that, if you're only expressing anxiety about it without remorse sufficient to stop doing it, then it's psychotherapy, not confession, and you don't qualify for absolution, only a bill.

A clam-knife has a sharp side and then a dull side for your four clenched fingers to power the knife into the shell-crevice and through the resisting creature's grip.  If you're an adept, you always seem to find a spot along the crevice to wedge the sharp side of your knife into. But I'm not an adept. So, there are ways to coax the poor creature to part its lips for your kiss of death. One traditional method is to pile your clams in a pot and heat it up on the stove until they sigh their mortal sigh, but this cooks the clams a bit, and you want them raw to start with. Another method is to put them in the freezer just long enough to kill them just enough that, brought back to room temperature, they begin to release their grip on their shell and their life. This never worked for me, so I came up with a way of my own.  Yes, my own.

When I get my clams home—which need to keep breathing until you kill them, so no suffocating them in plastic bags prematurely!—I put them in a bowl of salted water to rest and shed sand. When I'm ready to make my clam elixir, I scrub them one by one under running water. This is where things get weird. I put them back into in a bowl of fresh cold water in the sink and run a slow stream of hot water into the bowl. As the water in the bowl gets warmer and warmer, the clams by and by begin to relax, one by one, and to crack open just enough for me to snatch it up and wedge the sharp end of my knife into the crevice. 

I use a rubber glove on my left hand to hold the clam (rather than the traditional kitchen towel), to keep me from cutting myself if I slip with the sliding knife in my right hand. I also have a second bowl under me to catch the clam juices, until I shall succeed in breaching the clam's defenses and scraping it into its own juices (do clams have blood? that's not a pool of clear blood, is it?). Now, it's not enough to pry open the shell: you then have to drive your knife straight through to cut the muscle at the nape clamping down the shell. Only by that deathblow will you render your clam defenseless to your scraping. (I don't actually know at what point exactly the poor creature dies, and I don't want to know. I know enough evil as it is.)

If you're a professional mangler of live clams, you're no doublt chortling at me for this coaxing, having shucked legions of iced clams without batting an eye. But that's no reason to charge $6 a dozen to do so. Shame on you! Furthermore, if you're a chortling aficionado of clams, I want you to stop reading and to go away, because you're just going to jeer at my squeamishness, but I can't hear you, so what's the point of that?  Go—chortling, if you like—but stay not to jeer.

If you're not a chortling aficionado and have stayed, then I'm going to start by jeering at the vanity of aficionados, because you, Gentle Reader, can hear my jeering, and that's the whole point of your reading my blog, right? 

Now, the Italian clam-aficionado will no doubt tell you that the aristocrat of clam dishes is white clam sauce done right. By done right, he's going to say made with true Italian vongole, which Italian name he'll claim is not for what we Americans call clams. Nonsense. Italian clams come from the same Veneridae family of edible bivalve mollusks as ours. What he really means to say is that the grooved carpet-shell or Palourde species of clam is what is used around Naples, whence the dish originates. You can no doubt find someone to sell you these small, salty, toothsome Ruditapes clams for an exorbitant price, but you have an Atlantic coastline rife with delicious Mercenaria clams, so why pay for someone to cross the Atlantic to get you clams from the Italian coastline and charge you for transporting them to your own coastline?  Vanity of vanities.

And the vanity isn't finished yet. If you price out the cost-per-pound of the clam-meat of a carpet-shall separated from its shell and juice, you might be paying more per pound than for gold, given how little meat there is in these pretty mini-clams. This, in my opinion, is why they pile the shells up high on your linguine, compelling you to harvest your own clam-meat at table. Besides making it look like you're getting a lot more for your money than you are, it appeals to the concupiscense of the eyes and the pride of life: the delight in the sight of something difficult and expensive to acquire. But to my mind, this vanity makes neither culinary nor gustatory sense. Don't I want my clam meat entwined by my linguine, so that every forkful contains some? As a cook, I think so. Once I scrape out my bits of meat from my tiny shells (getting my fingers all sticky) and I pile the skeletons around my pasta bowl, am I supposed to delight in a pile of spaghetti slushing around in a puddle of clam juice?  As an eater, I think not.  

For an American variation on this vanity, don't confuse the netted bags of mini seed-clams often available on the East Coast for these ridged Italian carpet-shells. Those bags are used at fisheries to grow baby Little-necks into full-sized ones, and someone got the bright idea of selling you the babies. Personally, I don't find any babies tastey, be they American or Italian, unless eaten raw from the shell. Let a rawbar do the tedious business of opening an abundant pile of mini-clams for you, squirt some lemon on them and fresh grindings of black pepper (insist on a pepper mill), and suck them up for an appetizer. Then use a cocktail napkin to dry off your fingertips. I think that's what God thinks you should do with baby clams.

For white clam sauce stateside, I like big Littlenecks or little Topnecks, the littlest Littlenecks being too little and the biggest Topnecks being too big. Allow me to explain. At a store on the East Coast you're liable to find multiple sizes of clam under multiple names: Littleneck, Middleneck, Topneck Cherrystone, Chowder, in size-order from littlest to biggest. These names are just trade-labels for different sizes of the same species of hard-shelled clam, Atlantic Quahog, and the size differences are approximate and prudential, being unregulated, so don't trust the store names, trust your eyes. 

Because I want to tongue bits of clam in every forkful of my linguine, I want enough clam-meat to distribute throughout the dish. But I also want the clam meat both tender and tastey. I never find anything very young very tastey when cooked, just tender, so I like the littlest Littlenecks raw, for unattentuated flavor. However, the bigger Littlenecks are not only tastey and tender but chubby enough to cook up. The littler Topnecks, being younger than the bigger ones, also cook up tender. Middlenecks in between them are probably your best bet for clam sauce. Whatever the name, look for clams in their pubescence: say, one to two inches wide?

Ideally, I want six clams per person. For a first dish, I count 4 persons per pound of pasta, which means 24 clams, or two dozen clams per pound of pasta. Clams are not cheap, so neither is white clam sauce. That's the price of vanity. To economize, could do 5 clams per 4 servings, or 20 clams per pound of pasta; or else just call it 18 clams per pound without futher ado—though as few as a dozen certainly won't do. 

For a dozen clams per pound of pasta, red clam sauce is no less delicious than white and much cheaper, if plebby. You see, for red clam sauce you only need enough clams to flavor the tomato sauce, which does the distributing of clamessence. It's strange that the tomato sauce does not overwhelm the clam flavor, but rather amplifies it. It's a kind of secret of God's which he has saved for the humble, sending the rich empty away. In tomato sauce you could get away with as few as a dozen clams for a pound of pasta, and could even use somewhat larger Topnecks, to economize, cutting up the clam-meat smaller and cooking it a bit longer—although more tenderness and less cooking is always better, if you can afford it. And more clams are better than fewer, needless to say.

Speaking of cooking, it's time.

Making The Elixil Mixture

Now that we have separated the clams and their juices from their lives and their shells, we shall make an elixil mixture in which they infuse aromatized extra virgin olive oil with clamessence, for diffusion in a white clam sauce, red clam sauce, or risotto, as you wish.

Let me begin with a disclaimer, however. I'm not ashamed that I like my elixir very clean. My mother likes my white clam sauce exceedingly, and she was exceedingly good at making it back in the day, and her favorite dish to order at an Italian restaurant is still linguine with white clam sauce, so I have the predilictive approval of a maternal aficionado to defy the chortling of any hanger-on still reading just to jeer (and no doubt chortling But you wash away all the flavor of the clam that way, of the sea, my friend! That's how they talk.) Well, there's enough flavor left to please my mother, and that's enough for me. And if that's not enough for you, well, cleanliness is next to Godliness, so I think God is with me as well as my mother.

In any case, I have before me a bowl of clam carcasses submerged in warm murky clam juices. So, to clean and cool the carcasses, I make a bowl of cold salt-water and I gently take up each carcass one-by-one (yes, one-by-one) and jiggle it in the cold salt-water, to rinse off any sand clinging to its crevices. Once the clams are all thus rinsed and piled on a cutting board, I take each one-by-one (yes, one-by-one) and with the sharp tip of my sharp knife I cut out anything black, tough, or slimey. (Just ignore any silent chortling if you're not willing to eat just anything flavorful. Would you eat the unevacuated bowels of a cow? Then why of a clam? I imagine the cow's would savor of the earth as much as the clam's of the sea. Is that reason enough for you? Even though you mangled that poor clam like a ravenous beast, doesn't mean you have to eat it like one.)

Once I have a prettily trimmed pile of beige clam meat, I slice it up into fine strips, which I scrape into a clean bowl, for seasoning. But, but, but, be very careful to reserve that bowl of murky clam juices (though not the salt-bath—throw that away). Don't let any cleaning maniac pour the murky clam juice out into the sink. That is the elixil juice for the extra virgin olive oil which will sauce our linguine. Let that bowl of murky clam juice continue to sit for now, so that all impurities have time to sediment at the bottom of the bowl. Later, we will very gently pour this elixil clam juice through the finest of strainers into a sauce-pan, stopping short of that sediment pouring out with it.

Back to the bowl of clam strips. The principal seasoning for them is garlic, lots of it, very finely chopped: a clove per person (or per half-dozen clams, i.e., 4 cloves per pound of pasta and 2 dozen clams). To my mind, linguine with clam sauce is essentially linguine all'aglio e olio next-leveled by clam meat and juice. I certainly think it's to the credit of clams that they are not only not overwhelmed by all that garlic, but on the contrary commandeer it: a little clam goes a long way on the back of a lot of garlic. But I do want that garlic chopped very fine (though not minced—never minced), so that I don't tongue the garlic bits as a separate item from the clam bits. On the other hand, it's nice to see the garlic bits, so first I halve each clove, lay the halves flat-side down, make a few longintudinal slices, and then slice crosswise as thinly as possible. This will yield garlic bits of visible breadth and intangible depth. 

Scrape that hill of visible yet intangible garlic bits onto your pile of clam slices in the bowl. Now lightly salt and heavily pepper with fresh gratings of black pepper. Black pepper is your principle spice because you won't be permitted under any circumstance to put grated cheese on your clam sauce. Red pepper freshly ground (or flakes in a pinch) will be permissible at table, although not now in the elixir. 

(Why can't you put cheese on your clam sauce, you ask me? Because God doesn't want you to, I reply. But why would God in the first place give me a desire he doesn't want me to satisfy, you retort sophistically? I say to you that that desire is not God speaking to you but your original sin. Granted bad genes or bad upbringing are not your fault, they are nonetheless a fault you can recognize and renounce. If you can't taste for yourself the reason why, you should do as my mother advises: Look at people who do better than you, not people who do worse than you. That would be my people, and they never ever put cheese on pasta with fish. Black pepper freshly ground, red pepper flakes, fresh EVOO, but never ever cheese.)

Now chop up lots of fresh parsely very fine (but not minced, never minced), enough to thoroughly cover your pile of clam strips and garlic bits. For the final and decisive touch, pour extra virgin olive all over the pile, running down the sides and puddling in the bowl. That olive oil is the substance of the sauce. There should be enough oil to make a chunky clam soup (a.k.a. elixir).

As I said, clam sauce is really just sublated aglio et olio. The olio is the sauce, so there needs to be enough to coat all the strands of a pound of pasta. I can't imagine less than a quarter cup of olive oil doing that, and I daresay a half-cup wouldn't be too much for the hale and hearty palate. Discounting the calories, extra virgin olive oil is good for you, your skin, even your cholesterol, so if you're prey to the pride of staying slimmer than is age-appropraite, cook something else, but don't ruin God's recipe.

Mix the clam strips and seasonings well to marry, turning them over and over with the garlic, parsely, and EVOO, and let them all marinade together, until it's time to make the sauce. Now and again mix again, for friction mates flavors. The flavors should smell rousing to you. If they don't, you don't have enough of something. 

Making White Clam Sauce

Linguine with white clam sauce must be eaten hot and fresh out of the pot, so timing is critical. Be sure your eaters are at table waiting for it; do not leave bowls of it at table waiting for them. Also, make sure all bowls, both serving and eating, are warmed to receive the freshly tossed linguine with clams, whether by running hot water over the bowls or zapping them in the nuker.

Bring an abundant pot of water well-salted (big palmful of kosher salt for big pot of water) to a rolling boil, and put in your linguine or spaghetti (keeping them moving with a spatula until a rolling boil does it for you). Next, very gently strain into a sauce pan your bowl of clam juice through the finest of sieves, stopping short of any sediment pouring out, and slowly bring the clarified clam juice to simmering for several minutes. (It's ideal if you have a sauce pan big enough for your pasta but not too big for your clam juice, so that you can toss the pasta with the calm sauce in this pan. Otherwise, used a heated mixing/serving bowl for the tossing.) When the pasta is five minutes short of being cooked, add your marinaded clams to the simmering clam juice. Raise the heat to bring the pot to a simmer again, and simmer the clams for 3 minutes or so, but not more than 5. You want to cook the clam meat as little as possible, to keep it tender. If the juices seem insufficient, add pasta water to make the sauce soupy enough. 

(It would not be execrable to supplement your clam's native juices with a bottle of pure clam juice. But let us not mention this again.)

When the linguine is just short of perfect—a tad too toothsome—use a spork to transfer it dripping wet to either the hot pot of clam sauce (if it's big enough for tossing the linguine in), or else to a warmed serving bowl into which you pour two-thirds of the clam sauce for tossing (reserving the last third for topping). Now gently and patiently, even lovingly, toss and toss, to coat the linguine with the clam sauce and to entangle the clam bits in the strands (perhaps adding a bit of pasta water, in the unlikely case that the pasta seems too dry). When the glistening linguine, bespeckled with bits of clam, effuses clamessence, top them off with the remaining third of clam elixir, to make a show of clams on top (be it in a serving bowl for the table, or in each bowl individually plated). Bring to table steaming. Breathe in before eating. Add fragrant gratings of black pepper or pinches of red pepper to season the steam, as desired.

Making Red Calm Sauce

Just as white clam sauce is just aglio e olio sublated, so is red clam sauce just sauce alla marinara sublated. But marinara is not just marinara to me, because those nearest and dearest to me, my own kin, join the jeering aficianados when it comes to my way—yes, my way—of making marinara. But I shall obey God rather than the traditions of men, even though such obedience set a son against his father and a daughter against her mother.

There are traditional remedies for unpleasantly sharp marinara. Some people add sugar, some bicarbonate of soda, the former to mask the acidity with a sweet counterpoise, the latter to neutralize it chemically with a base. But where does the acidity come from in the first place? Often from citric acid added to the can to preserve the tomatoes. Additional tomato juice is also often added to the tomatoes' own run-off, and God only knows where that additive comes from. What I know is that the heart of man is an abyss, so I don't trust any of the liquid in any can of tomatoes, no matter how expensive, regulated, or recommended. I dump it all out into the sink. My people think I'm crazy. 

And not without reason, perhaps. I'm often dumping out a full-third of the can's contents, paid for by the ounce. But I think of it as pickling liquid. Would you drink the pickle-water in your pickle jar? Sure, some pervs put it in their martinis, but it's called a dirty martini for a reason. And as we know, I cook clean.

For a while I was deaf to the deprecations of aunts and cousins watching me dump down the drain what they have cooked forever. I felt justified by my final product: a marinara that required no sugar, no soda, no apologies: tasty, tangy, and sweet. But one time when I was making a great deal of gravy, even I was given pause by how much perfectly pretty tomato puree I was about to dump down the drain. So, I decided to put it to the test. I cooked just the canning puree down to the thickness of a smooth sauce, adding only salt and olive oil as usual, and it tasted inedibly awful. Now I felt not only God but science is on my side.

And, in fact, the conversation with cousins and aunts that always ends in derision always begins with, "This is delicious. What did you do to this sauce?" Then when I tell them, without missing a beat, "Nooo!"  

Yesss, I fish out each tomato from the can with a fork and lay it out on a plate, leaving all acidity behind. Then, to give yet more reason for jeering, I seed the tomatoes one by one, to exclude the bitterness of the seeds. That means slicing each in half, and squeezing each half gently to get the juice to trickle out carrying the seeds along with it, and scraping them along with the back of a knife. (Now they're all laughing and calling me crazy. This is what my mother means when she says You play house.) I used to try to rescue these native juices by straining them back into the pot, but the tedium and messiness are not worth it, I've found. I just use the tomatoes. Full stop.

The tomatoes need crushing for a chunky marinara, rather than pureeing. You can cut them up now on the cutting board and scrape them into the pot; or crush them with your hands, as my grandmother did; or, as I do, dump them into the pot and mash them later on with a masher after a bit of cooking softens them. In any case, normally I do add a bit of fresh water, just a few ounces. (Yes, water. Chortle away, if you like, but my faith remains inconcussable: this is what the tomato wants, and so what God wants, and I want what they want. So should you.)  However, in the case of red clam sauce, I add the clam juices, poured out gently through the finest of strainers, stopping short of any sediment trickling out.  The tomatoe pulp is to cook down in the clam juice for its own infusion with clamessence.

Normally I would have first sauteed garlic cloves in oil before adding tomato pulp and cooking it down into a chunky sauce, adding only salt, and fresh basil leaves at the end, if you have them. But we're counting on the clam elixir's oil to transfigure our marinara with its clamessent infusion. So, I might perhaps add a little oil to my marinara to militate against sticking and burning, but if I trust my heavy-bottomed pot to militate against sticking and burning, I won't even do that; I'll just not forget to keep stirring my sauce. I'll keep a cover on the pot ajar, and yet the tomato pulp will still cook down quickly into a sauce because of the reduced amount of juice, and I believe this shorter cooking time likewise militates against sharpness. My sauce comes out bright, pulpy, and fresh.

Several minutes short of this unflavored marinara cooking down to the right density, I'll add the clam elixir to cook the clams minimally, to keep them tender.  Less than five minutes of simmering, to be sure. Taste for tenderness, needless to say. Correct for salt, needless to say. Maybe stir in a fresh drizzling of extra virgin olive oil after the sauce comes off the heat, if it wants it. Give it whatever it wants.

What it doesn't want is grated cheese.

Making Clam Risotto

This is far from my favorite risotto, but it's a favorite of those who favor clams.

If you already know how to make risotto, it's as easy as that. As in the case of marinara sauce, the clam elixir to be added in the last five minutes will be the primary seasoning of the risotto. So, it doesn't need the usual base of sauteed onion, in my opinion, although it will do no harm, if you want it. On the other hand, butter belongs to the essence of risotto, in my opinion, even fish risotto, any jeering from my people notwithstanding. Melt a wad of butter in a puddle of regular olive, and when it foams, add the arborio rice, and with a flat-sided wooden spatula saute to glistening.

Have salted simmering water ready to add to the rice a ladleful or two at a time, stirring continuously, if leisurely, with the heat adjusted to keep the rice simmering lively. You should add a ladeful or so of water only when you can see the bottom of the pot as you scrape the rice with your spatula. Cook the rice with water until it is five minutes short of being ready, perhaps as long as fifteen minutes, until puffed but still tough at the core.

Have the strained clam juices simmering just in time to add to the pot now along with the clam elixir. If you have an abudance of clam juice, you can start substituting clam juice for water earlier, but make sure you have enough left at the end to add in for the final round of stirring in the clam elixir. As with the sauces above, you want to cook the clams minimally, to keep them tender. Less than five minutes of simmering, to be sure. Timing is everything, and only experience teaches you that. Just keep tasting for tenderness, and correct for salt while you're at it. It's the only way to know what's right in the moment.

Now, a crisis of conscience looms. Normally, finishing the risotto for plating, after a few minutes of covered resting, by whipping in freshly grated parmigiano and a wad of butter, is critical. Would I ever do it with clams? Nooo. Here, I stand by my people. Were something more needed, I'd whip in some fresh extra virgin olive oil and freshly ground black pepper. But cheese and butter with clams? Well, that's between you, your conscience, and your god.  But I don't want to know.