May 30
In Defense of Clam Strips
Howard Johnson and Mrs. Paul lied to us.
Over the years, I’ve learned that spending a week in a beach cottage on Cape Cod is an excellent way of finding out things that you hadn’t realized are important to you. For example, it turns out I’m a big fan of hooks, because when I’m outside, I’m likely to be wearing a light jacket or hoodie (the outer cape is ocean-breezy and I’ve become one of those people who’s cold all the damn time) and carrying a backpack, and when I come back inside, I would like to be able to hang those things up. This cottage has no hooks. However, every window in this cottage has Venetian blinds, and I’m reminded every summer that those are my favorite window treatment, both for the simple elegance of the design and because the slatted shadows they cast look cool. (I blame my early-teens MTV addiction for that — lights through Venetian blinds were a staple of ’80s music videos.)
This year’s realization came on our first night here, as my wife Charity and I were enjoying the season’s first clam-shack dinner. Unlike my Massachusetts Yankee spouse, I am not a native New Englander (my roots are in west Texas and northern Colorado, and I moved here after spending my 20s in New Mexico), but I’ve lived here long enough to adopt many of the local customs, from drinking iced coffee year-round to buying a solid 40 percent of my entire wardrobe from LL Bean outlet stores. But there’s one point in particular on which I will never be on the same page as the majority of New Englanders.
I like clam strips. As a matter of fact, it’s possible that I prefer clam strips to whole-belly clams.
What New Englanders mean when they say “fried clams” are the soft-shell clams local to the tidal flats of the Atlantic Ocean. Shelled, breaded (or, occasionally, battered), deep-fried, and served with fries and tartar sauce, they’ve been a staple of local seafood menus for decades. The “whole-belly” part comes from the fact that fried clams are cooked and eaten whole, including the belly, which yeah, is literally the clam’s digestive tract. It’s FINE, you guys. At most, there might be a certain…softness to one particular bite while chewing. It doesn’t detract from the flavor of the clam itself, which is surprisingly delicate and a little sweeter than you might expect if your previous experience with bivalves is with the more briny and mineral-tasting oysters.
On the other hand, clam strips are made from hard-shell clams, also known as surf clams, which are larger (more like 4–7 inches instead of the 2–3 inches of a soft-shell clam) and live a little deeper out in the ocean than soft-shell clams do. Too large to be cooked whole, the clam meat (excluding the belly) is cut into strips and fried.
By the way, some poorly-sourced internet articles occasionally claim that clam strips are made from either razor clams or the vaguely obscene geoducks. Those are both Pacific species, and therefore unlikely to show up on restaurant menus here on the Atlantic side of the country when surf clams are…literally right here.
There is a weird New England flex that clam strips are not only inferior to whole-belly clams, but they’re somehow straight-up inedible, or at the very least some kind of processed food that has as much to do with a “true” fried clam as Kraft slices have to a fine mature Cheddar. This has a lot to do with the fact that most people were introduced to the clam strip either through the menus of bygone chain restaurants like Howard Johnson’s or Friendly’s, or even worse, through the Mrs. Paul’s boxes that used to be in supermarket frozen foods sections. (Not gonna lie, these were my introduction as well.) I can always tell that these people have never actually eaten a proper New England clam-shack clam strip when they describe them as “flavorless,” or — and this is absolutely the cliched description — “like chewing on rubber bands.”
If anything, clam strips have a more intense clam flavor than all but the largest whole-belly clams, and are less chewy than, say, a properly flash-fried calamari, which also isn’t very chewy. The easiest way to disprove the rubber-band lie is to point to the rest of the clam shack menu, which likely includes both clam chowder and a Rhode Island-born appetizer standard, the stuffie: a breadcrumb stuffing filled with chopped clams, onions, and pickled hot peppers, then stuffed back into the clam shell and run under a broiler. Both of those dishes are also made with surf clams, and no one complains about either one.
What I’m saying is that clam strips taste as good or arguably better than whole-belly clams. And during this week on Cape Cod, I’ve eaten whole-belly clams in Provincetown and clam strips in Wellfleet. The first were market price, which turned out to be $32.95. The second were $21.99. (Both were served with coleslaw and fries, and were both fairly overflowing portions, or at least really more than I should have eaten. I always gain weight on the cape, although that’s in part due to easy access to both rocky road ice cream and peanut butter fudge.) So…tastier and cheaper.
I mean, do whatever you want. It’s your beach vacation. You don’t even have to eat clams when you go to a clam shack. The name conjures up nostalgic images of little tarpaper and shingle outbuildings on the shoreline that are open only from Memorial Day to Labor Day, and that’s probably what most of them were 70 or 80 years ago. Today, clam shacks are basically any New England restaurant with a seafood-driven menu, although to be taken seriously, they really should be within sniffing distance of a low tide.
A decent clam shack also serves fried haddock or cod, scallops, and maybe if they’re seriously old-school, fried smelts, which are like those little black fish that cartoon cats from the 1940s stick in their mouths and then pull out a skeleton. There’s also lobster rolls, but honestly, that’s a whole different essay that would get into regional hot vs. cold skirmishes, the anti-celery brigade, and why hot dog rolls in New England look so weird to those of us who didn’t grow up here, and I just don’t care enough to get into all that. Just enjoy yourselves this summer. Don’t forget the sunscreen.
