The first fact about the dyed-in-the-wool, ancient, and honorable Down East institution called the shore dinner is that it is never eaten on the shore. All the makings of it come dripping and only a matter of minutes from the seashore; but you eat it at a table like civilized people, in the home, in your party clothes, with all the plates and platters and baskets the house can provide to dish up its various toothsome items seriatim and to receive all the many shells after you have eaten your merry way through them and gotten out all their meat. This dinner is all shellfish, no fish. It is not to be confused with the clambake, which is celebrated in the open, under the wind and sky and sun, with no dishes but your scorched hands, no knives, no forks, no spoons, with nothing but holy hunger to edge you on. That dinner is eaten on the haunches, in front of a pile of rockweed smoking on top of a fire of ship's timbers right on the shore. But the shore dinner is not on the shore.
This historic dinner is simple. It is clams, lobsters, clams, lobsters—that is all. In that order. Heathens, Hottentots, and outsiders may, and often do, bring in mussels, quahaugs, codfish steaks, and clam chowder, and the Lord knows what else. But your true son of the State of Maine sticks to the ancient ritual. Now and then he is corrupted and serves chowder as a soup to friends from the outside, but more often he sticks to the Medes and the Persians and runs the arpeggios of the old ritual. It is a ritual. One no more departs from it than one wears rubber boots to a lawn fete. Our whiskered ancestors left their footprints in the stone; we do but follow in those footmarks.
Steamed clams come first. These should be rushed while the azure of their tidal mud is still on them, while they arc still fountaining out diamonds from their thin, oval shells under the impression that it is the flooding tide and not their doom at hand, into a deep kettle with a cupful of their lost ocean under them, steamed in their own delectable juice for fifteen or twenty minutes. When they open up like so many dark butterflies, they are dished up in a vast crock or mixing bowl that will hold about a peck of them—the bowl is rushed to the table—urgency and haste are always close to the best interest of clams—the bowl is set in the exact center of the table, so that all will have fair play. Each shore-diner then seizes a double handful of the hot things and heaps them on his plate, seizes another and dumps that. Hot clam juice is served in tall glasses. This is chiefly to wash the grit out of the clams. People, famished people, do drink it sometimes; it is flavorful and nutritious, they say. But the drinker must beware of going below the last third of the glass, for if he does, he will drink grit.
Foreigners to Maine try to use forks and knives on steamed clams. It is like trying to eat macaroni on knitting needles. Like an Occidental trying to keep from starving with Oriental chopsticks. It can be done. But it is neither reasonable nor graceful. Your knives and forks are your teeth and ten fingers. Fingers only are served with steamed clams.
You lift off the top shell, holding the clam's snout and the clam down on the other shell with your left thumb. With your right hand you tear the pale ivory bivalve from his house and from his snout. If you are skilled, his shoulder straps come off on his cap. You seize the clam by his brunette head—only one in sixty clams is blond—dangle him in the hot clam water, dip him into the pannikin of hot melted butter, tip back your head, and down him. You don't have to do much of any chewing. He is all tenderness. Of course, you can get burned, on fingers, lips, and tongue. But your burns are healed instantly by the savoriness of the morsel. With hot tears scalding your eyes you go after more; keeping a jealous eye on your neighbors to make sure that they arc not heading you off from the next plateful. You toss the empty shells, as you go, into the large empty bowl strategically placed at the table's center beside the full one and equidistant from all competitors. For this course is competition, and may the nimblest-fingered win!
Restaurants serve steamed clams heaped around a well of clam water or with a dish of melted butter nested in the clams. But all such refinements delay one who is hoeing in, and they are purposely designed to slow the eater down in his consumption. At home, you stop for no filigrees but dig yourself deep into your hill of clams and come snorting out on the other side. You allow nothing to entangle your twinkling fingers when you are at work.
After your second or third plateful of clams, the lobster stew comes on. This is weighted down with chunks of red and white meat; it is more soup than stew, and a most substantial one. It is made from the meat of steamed lobsters not an hour away from freedom six-seven fathoms down in the sea. The shelled meat has been sautéed with vast slabs of new butter, milk and thick cream have been stirred cautiously into the mess as it simmers—about one-third weight of butter to the meal's bulk. When the whole is just on the crinkling edge of coming to a boil, you snatch the kettle off the fire and bowl it out to your guests. You use the largest sizes in bowls. The stew is as much solid meat as liquid, and the liquid is ambrosia pure and clear. You eat the stew with hardtack, the unleavened cracker which sailors used to break their eyeteeth on off the Horn, but it is civilized now, and it crumbles the minute you bite into its flat taste, an admirable foil to the sharpness of the lobster flavor. You crunch dill pickles in long slivers as you go—a spoonful of stew, a bite at the pickle, a spoonful of stew—left, right, left, right, up and down the center, and ladies' chain!
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