Intrepid Clammers

     If we had special-ordered the day, it could not have been better yesterday!  Sun!  Breeze!  A minus 1.0 tide at 11:05 a.m.  Absolutely perfect conditions for the short trek out to our second-class tidelands with friends to get steamer clams.  And get them we did!
     Armed with garden rakes and other clawed digging tools, five of us headed bayward about 9:30.  Ten minutes later we were in the middle of a clam hotel – dozens of the little darlings just inches below the mudflats, and all waiting for us.
     Although steamers aren’t totally sedentary, they don’t race away from you like razor clams.  They pretty much stay put and wait for you to discover them – sort of a hide-and-seek operation.  They sometimes move along under the sand and when they do that, they leave a little “track.”  It looks a lot like someone dragged a finger along the sand for an inch or two.
     If you dig at one end or the other of a clam track, sure as shooting you’ll find a clam.  But tracks are few and far between so it’s better to just rake around a few areas until you find a clammy patch.  It doesn’t take long to get enough for the evening clam feed.
     What does take a long time is cleaning them.  We don’t like grains of sand mixed in with our clams and garlic butter so when we get our buckets home, we dump the contents onto the lawn.  Then we spend an hour or two with a stiff brush and the hose handy, scrubbing and rinsing each clam.
     Next they need to sit in a bucket of clean bay water for six or eight hours cleaning themselves.  Some people use tap water with a handful of cornmeal thrown in.  That works fine, too, but we think the clams are more tender (as if they could be!) if it’s familiar old saltwater that they are filtering.
     The final step, of course, is to steam these morsels of perfection and serve them with plenty of garlic butter, French bread, and a tossed green salad!  Oh, and maybe a glass of wine or two.  Based on the number of clams the five of us ate last night, we figured that a comparable dinner in a restaurant would have cost upwards of $300!  And all it ‘cost’ us was one of the most enjoyable days of summer!  We are truly blessed.