Let me begin by saying that I thought of writing a children's book about a fried clam. The title was going to be Flim-Flam, the Good Fried Clam. The plot was even more of a problem. Umberto Eco, the Italian postmodernist, once remarked (although Virginia Woolf said the same thing 70 years earlier) that we read stories to experience the thrill of the inevitable: to strap ourselves into the life of a character as if the character were a roller coaster, which then goes screaming down the heart-stopping track of life inescapably until it bumps to a stop at the end. But my attempts to bring Flim-Flam the Clam to life on dry paper taught me that a story can be too inevitable.
However the tale started out -- Flam the Clam gets scooped up by a sailor and sees the world, Flam meets a tourist on the beach and is taken back to the cottage for dinner, Flam runs away from his mud-flat home to the city, where he is befriended by a Chinese chef -- it (inevitably) ended with Flam being fried. Because Flam is a clam. And if Flam is a clam, he must be fried -- because as Virginia Woolf also said, a good story makes you feel it can happen only one way. And once fried, he must also be eaten, as it is not believable within the frame of human reference that a fried clam can exist and not be consumed.
So Flam got on the sailboat and even saw Madagascar -- but then he was fried and eaten. He made friends with the tourist's little girl who really -- ah, but then he was fried and eaten. He learned Mandarin while living in a tank for weeks and customers loved him and gave him a name, but . . . yes, delicious clam, he was eaten.
And really, how much of a story is that? Better just to fry the little bastard, and consume him -- and possibly his brothers and sisters and extended family as well.
Here is another clam-related experience you should not attempt: You should not decide to drive from Boston to New Hampshire for the weekend, and in the course of passing through Essex on Cape Ann an hour north of Boston, the birthplace of the fried clam and still home to its finest exemplification, listen to your brother Tim, an equally enthusiastic clam consumer, say, "You know, we should stop and eat clams on the drive back, and try to find the best clam place in Essex," only to depart far too late the following day, thereby leaving yourselves a mere two hours to visit the five finest clam stands in the Western world.
You should not do this because you will try to visit all the clam stands anyway, which would be like going to Perigord and consuming every known variation of foie gras in half an afternoon. It would be bad for your health.
We decided to clam ahead. We have always liked travelling and talking and eating, my brother and I; when we aren't talking, we tend to be eating, or thinking about eating. You might be tempted to suggest that this is a substitute for intimacy, but you would be mistaken.
My brother and I have never had trouble talking about intimate things, provided we're tucking into a lobster roll, or a double-smoked hickory bacon and avocado BLT, or maybe a shrimp, mango and dill mayonnaise rollup.
Then there's the ultimate intimate brotherly thrill -- talking about eating while eating, preferably clams.
At this point, a brief digression is required to discuss the clam qua clam, as Samuel Beckett would have said. Clams are bivalves -- mollusks, if you must -- that burrow under the sea floor.
While there are more than 15,000 species of clam -- the biggest, the aptly named giant clam, Tridacna gigas, can be 1.5 metres long and weigh as much as five table dancers -- the species we are most concerned with here is the Ipswich clam.
The Ipswich is a soft-shell clam found in the mud flats of the Essex River. The Essex is a tidal estuary in Essex Bay, which in turn is part of the 7,000-hectare Great Marsh that riddles the Massachusetts coast all the way to New Hampshire. The lucky clams of Essex Bay can use their tube-like necks, or siphons, to suck in tiny fresh plankton with every flowing tide, twice a day.
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