26 November 2016

Palourdes, clams, ou coques

Walt said yesterday that he felt like eating some spaghetti with clam sauce, after two days of meals based on lamb, beans, and potatoes. So I'll be going to the market in Saint-Aignan in a few minutes, while he takes Callie for her morning walk. There's a seafood vendor at the market who comes to town every Saturday from the Marennes-Oléron area on the Atlantic coast, between Bordeaux and La Rochelle. It's a four-hour drive.


The last time we had spaghetti with clam sauce, we made it with a kilogram of what were called « palourdes japonaises » that I got from the fish section of our local SuperU grocery store. When I bought them, I wondered to myself if they could possibly be imported. The little net bag they were packaged in was well labeled, however, and set me straight.


It turns out that these Pacific Ocean clams are "farmed" in France, along the country's southwest Atlantic coast. Palourdes are in the same family as the North American clam, but they are smaller. There are native French palourdes, and there are palourdes in all the world's oceans, if I understand correctly. The "Japanese" shellfish turned out to be what are known as Manila clams in the U.S. We used to enjoy eating them in California, where they were often cooked the way mussels are cooked in France — à la marinière, with garlic, white wine, and herbs.


The clams from SuperU were of the species Ruditapes philippinarum. That second term was a good clue that they were the same Manila clams we had on the U.S. west coast. I grew up eating clams, mostly as chowder, on the coast of North Carolina, where we would go clamming on sandbars in the sounds in summertime, using rakes, shovels, or just our hands and feet to dig the clams out of the sand. The French-raised Manila clams are labeled as having been "fished" out of the sand and water the same way — Pêch. à pied, the label says ("fished on foot"), in the Golfe de Gascogne.


I don't know what kind of clams I'll find at the market in Saint-Aignan. They could be palourdes like the Manila clams, which were introduced into French waters in the 1970s, according to the Larousse Gastronomique. Or they could be another variety known simply as « clams » [klahmss], which are the North American ones. Those were introduced into French waters about a century ago. There's another clam-like mollusk called the « praire » (the venus clam) in France. And finally, there are cockles or « coques », which we like a lot, and also a local Atlantic clam that's called the « lavagnon » on the SW French coast.


Whatever the variety, it's a good idea to give clams time to disgorge themselves of sand before you cook and eat them. What you do is make up a batch of cold salt water (unless you can get actual seawater), add in a tablespoon or two of corn meal (polenta) or semolina (cream of wheat), and let the clams soak in the water for a few hours. They will feed on the corn meal and expel any sand that remains in their digestive tract. Then they won't be gritty when you eat them.

18 comments:

  1. I heard Rick Stein last night on the telly refer to palourdes in Spain as carpet clams.

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    1. I don't know that term but the carpet clam images I see here (Paphia undulata) don't look at all like the Manila clams we had. For our lunch, I got cockles at the market this morning.

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  2. I have never heard of "Manila" clams ! Although I had to stop eating shellfish a few years ago. One night we had dinner in NYC Chinatown and that night I had this light rash all over my body. When it did not go away, I saw my doctor. Who admired the evenness of my bright red spots and told me to Never Ever eat shellfish again. In his words .. today you got a rash, next time you might just stop breathing.
    I do miss the Italian style stuffed clams and my husbands pasta with white clam sauce.
    Enjoy some for me :)

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    1. Oh in NYC, they called them Little Neck Clams :)

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    2. I've never really understood that term. Aren't they just small clams?

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  3. Last night, my French neighbor invited me again at "Mon Ami Gabi" for an oyster dinner this time. I ordered six of them. When they came, they looked very appetizing. When I took the first one out of the shell… sacrilege, they had been washed and were absolutely tasteless! I should have known better and oedered the moules marinières we had a few days before and which wee absolutely delicious. À bon entendeur, salut.

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    1. Sorry to hear about the oysters. Why in the world would one want to wash them? Often they say you don't need to worry about the water in the shell when you open them, because if you leave the oyster on the half-shell it will produce a "second water" that will be delicious. Stick with the mussels, I'd say. Was this the restaurant in Reston VA?

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  4. In our travels in France I've always been impressed with the seafood distribution away from the coast. We'd go to a market well inland and there would be fish vendors with beautiful offerings. One time we stayed in Sete, and took a walk at the end of the day past the wholesale fish market. There were trucks loading up and from the addresses on the trucks you could see that they were heading all over that part of France.

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    1. Nowhere in France is very far from the sea. But you could say the same thing about Maine.

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  5. Hope you two enjoyed them thoroughly :)

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  6. I love the way products in France are labeled; specifically what they are, precisely where they are from and how they were made/caught. We have nothing like this in the states.

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    1. I know, the labeling is very informative here.

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  7. Are the used shells good for anything, such as being mashed up and used in the garden or on a walkway? Just thinking in terms of recycling, from habit.
    Agree with Diogenes about the usefulness of complete labeling. The stuff in the US is pretty useless.

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    1. I throw the shells out behind the back gate, on the tractor path. I gets muddy when the weather's rainy, and the oyster and clam shells help stabilize it.

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  8. Je ne savais pas qu'on pouvait ajouter de la semoule de blé pour les faire rendre leur sable... Ou as-tu trouvé ce truc 😉??? Un peu comme la dernière clope pour une coque...damnée ☺ !!!

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    1. Je crois que c'est quelque chose qu'on faisait en Caroline du Nord, où on mangeait beaucoup de clams et où la côte c'est purement du sable. Pauvre coques... clams... palourdes... Les coques qu'on a mangées hier n'étaient pas sableuses du tout.

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