Dulce et Decorum Est, Pro Patria et Familia Ceno
While meeting a partner’s family for the first time is never an easy affair, joining that inner circle is an even harder one. Whereas the first encounter merely presents ample opportunities for rejection based on buffoonish errors, the second requires the discovery of the shared values and qualities of common ground in order to flourish. In other words, success in the first merely requires the avoidance of mistakes, whereas the second requires the founding of a new narrative, all without overwriting one’s own, existing, story.
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Robert Howard, aka Bob, aka Poppy’s “Clams Le Cirque” are simple enough in their use of the key ingredients whose presence improves any dish of the Western culinary canon. Prosciutto, garlic, basil, and hot pepper are all finely diced, added to the shucked clams, and topped with a little Parmigiano-Reggiano and olive oil before being baked on the half shell. As with many of the truly great and timeless dishes, there’s nothing to it really, beyond the otherworldly pleasure of quality ingredients helped along by the browning effect of the Maillard reaction.
The key to this story then, as with all food of any interest beyond the purely nutritional, stems not from the ingredients themselves, but rather the explanation of their presence at the table; in this case the Howard family Thanksgiving celebration.
Born and raised an Irish anomaly on the West Side of Stamford, CT in the 1930s, Poppy quickly realised that the neighbourhood Italians beat out his own heritage in the culinary department.
Surrounded by the multifarious bounties of his local salumerias, he wisely fell in love with the aromas and flavours of his neighbours’ kitchens over his own. Living on the Long Island Sound also made a wide range of fresh seafood a regular staple of even the humblest family tables in the area.
Later on, Poppy’s adult life in Brooklyn and Long Island satiated his need for Italian food, but Grandma’s work as a public school teacher and mother of three took up more and more of her time. Therefore, Poppy decided that learning how to replicate the flavours that he loved was more than a good idea to atone for the “guilt” that he says he felt.
Against this backdrop, then, he clipped out a recipe for “Clams Le Cirque” from the June 15, 1980 issue of the New York Times Sunday Magazine, written by the doyens of Grande Cuisine Pierre Franey and Craig Claiborne, saving it away for some special occasion. He must have been certain that Grandma, herself the daughter of an amateur clam fisherman from Amityville, Long Island, would approve. As it turns out, Thanksgiving that year provided an ideal venue for the launch of Poppy’s iteration of clams “Le Cirque”, as a pre-turkey hors d’oeuvre.
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Whereas the branding of the recipe as “Le Cirque” smacks of some very Westchester-appropriate 1980s glamour by the NYT, there is in fact something very old-world about the dish. No foams or dry ice here, and certainly no molecular gastronomy either. One can easily imagine Sirio Maccioni, Le Cirque’s founder, serving the dish in one of the grand dining rooms where he worked as a waiter on the Italian Line ship MS Giulio Cesare while plying the Genoa-Buenos Aires and Genoa-New York lines in the 1950s.
Such classic ingredients, presented without the faux humility of the modern “discovery” of allegedly “simple” food, was already on its way out in 1980. The clams have nothing of the “Hameau de la Reine”-esque, ersatz farmyard flavours that have become so popular in the past few decades. Instead, they are but unabashed luxury, honestly presented in all their glory.
Thankfully for us, the clams were so well received at that first Thanksgiving that, as Poppy said earlier this year, “the next year I wasn’t asked to prepare them again; I was told to do just that! 36 years later, I’m still at it!” Over time, the number of clams shucked has doubled or more, driven on by the twinned forces that dictate only the best family traditions: multi-generational appreciation for the objective qualities of the thing itself, and the metronomic solace of Proustian pleasure that takes place every time that time of year comes around.
Watching Poppy work, on the day before thanksgiving, it’s clear that the formality of the original recipe has slipped into the easy familiarity of the pizzaiolo at Grimaldi’s spinning his millionth pie, or the Singapore hawker serving up yet another bowl of Hainanese chicken rice. The proportions of the ingredients move around a little bit, and middle neck clams have replaced the original cherrystones due to their larger size. City Fish Market, in Wethersfield, CT has been the “beach” upon which Poppy has collected the clams for the past decade or so since retiring to West Hartford, replacing earlier ones in Brooklyn, and Long Island.
No matter where they’re from, Poppy quickly and deftly shucks the clams over the sink with the insouciant ability of an old fisherman, saving the precious nectar, sand and all, for a later chowder.
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The choice of clams for the base of such an important family Thanksgiving tradition is well founded in reasons beyond their mere deliciousness. The first governor of Plymouth Colony, William Bradford, saw fit to thank God for clams in his first Thanksgiving Proclamation in 1623, citing the Lord’s generosity in making “the forest abound with game, and the sea with fish and clams” among other blessings, less delicious in nature, such as protecting us “from the ravages of savages”.
Poppy’s clams therefore simultaneously enjoin us in the dual ways that the fundamental celebrations of life call us: firstly, those that connect us intimately, within the family circle, and secondly and more broadly as a culture and nation that contains such a complex and interwoven narrative.
Intimately, it connects us to the memory of 36 Howard Thanksgivings past, and the expectation of more to come, even for those such as myself who were not there at the start of the tradition. Broadly, it bonds us to the almost 4 centuries of Thanksgivings that we’ve honoured as an endlessly permutating nation, through thick and thin. It creates, as I believe only food can, a sensory bridge for the stranger to cross in order to become a known entity. We might not share blood, or history, or even a common future, but we can share in the immediate taste, and more enduring symbolism, of of a ceremonial meal.
To me, then, these clams serve as an icon for what the Howard family story was, is, and will be, and for Poppy as the paterfamilias for the portion of that narrative that is ours to witness. When the family is gathered, the wine and beer poured, the blessing said, and the chatter of reconnecting family members begun, my shellfish fork loosens the mass from the first shell. While the rich saltiness of the prosciutto, dark warmth of the cheese, and pure briny-ocean flavour of the clam never disappoints, it is the connection to a story both old and new, the adjoining of two narratives, that causes me to give most Thanks.
While little in this world is certain, one thing is; wherever this life takes me, these clams, duly rechristened “à la Poppy”, will be part of my own Thanksgiving tradition and story for the rest of my life.
Isaac Middelmann-Orlov lives in Dar es Salaam, but can be found trying not to cry into good food of all sorts, wherever time and money allow him, around the world.