Clams are the dish of March month. They are like new love, and they taste of the spring. The family will have them steamed and washed in their own scalding water, soused in the family melted butter, and dropped delicately into the tipped-back family gullet. The family will have them stewed, with nothing added to them but a foundation of a few salt pork scraps and half a cup of new butter. a quart of milk to each pint of shellfish, and a dozen Boston crackers as frosting on the hot stew's top. The family will have them Stoutly chowdered. And the clamshell walk from the porticoed front door to the Greek temple of a back door, now that the dirty last snow has melted, will get a new glory, a new layer of the snow from the bottom of the northern sea. The little boys and girls will crunch down the thin shells with feet full of the spring.
There's nothing so good to keep sharp March winds out of a body as the old-fashioned Coast clam chowder. It stands, as most fine northern chowders do, on pig. Dice of fat salt pork arc fried in the bottom of the iron kettle till they squirm and hiss deep brown. Then sliced onions arc fried brown on top of the pork scraps. Then the clams go in, in their own savory water, then some dice of potatoes shaven thin as moonbeams. Milk is poured in slowly and stirred constantly once the dish has come to a boil, and this stirring is done on the back of the stove to keep the milk from curdling. The whole is allowed to set till the milk begins to crinkle. More stirring, a bit of salt and pepper is added, and it is left to crust up again. When the dish browns at its surface for the richness of the pork at its base, mother puts in her last and crowning touch: She drops in her Boston crackers—common crackers to the outside world—and they float dry on their upper decks and soft on their lower, for they sop up the delectable liquid of transfigured clams under their keels.
Peter scalds his mouth, as he always does, in his haste to get outside of three bowls of this March chowder, keeping one bowl ahead of his brothers, and tears in his eyes for the goodness of this hot mess of sea pottage. Uncle Timothy is good for five straight bowk. He likes to have a little of the chowder left to eat cold, but he almost never does.
Now the farm really begins to go to sea. Never such a noise of hammers as now down at the green boathouse. Never such fragrances of hot coal tar and white lead and varnish. All who wear pans and two of the older girls are there, up to their eyes in paint and tar. They scour and scrape and refurbish the metalwork, scrape and sandpaper the planking of boats, and give all the family craft this year's coat of paint. Young John has two white eyes on his hind side where he sat down to rest himself on the plank his father and brothers and sisters have tried out their brushes on Everybody jokes about the eyes in John's breeches. Even the baby is there. William the Younger. Though he can't walk, young William can get around all right; he skitters around on all fours as quick as a crab. So to keep him from upsetting their paint pails, the workers have thrown a shad net over him. Me can still go and come, but not as far as the pails. He waves his arms and shouts, laps up a little paint wherever he can. and he thinks he is doing a lot even though he is anchored down a bit and his fat cheeks and fists are crisscrossed with the net.
And the new daughter of this seagoing farm comes out through the wide main barn doors, opened only in March and July for new daughters or loaded hayracks, and she rides on her rollers behind the farm's chestnut horses to the bayside. There she gets her COM of paint, and on the full-moon tide of Easter she will go into the ocean with her young nose high and handsome and eager to buck the whole weight of the Atlantic as she follows the long strings of the farm's lobster traps in wider and wider circles (ill the land is only a low cloud on the rolling horizons of the restless open set.
In the fishing shack, lobster traps are being rehabilitated, the slats that have been vermiculated by toredo worms are replaced with sound new yellow ones. The woven heads are being mended and tarred Uncle Timothy sits on his broad foundations and weaves tarred twine into new funnels to welcome in lobsters to a free lunch that may prove their last. Bait strings are rigged. Scores of new traps are being run up from bundles of laths. The laths are nailed to the half circles of spruce bows. New warps, smelling of the Philippines and Manila, me being tied on, with father's bourbon bottles put on with a half hitch halfway down their length—Maine lobsters respect nothing except bourbon—as lug buoys to keep the warps alive in the water. And wooden buoys, with long spindles stuck in them to pick them out of the sea by, painted in the family colors, green on white, are drying in the wicked bright March sun.
Pinterest
