Because surfboard rentals were not cheap, I got a job at Chris' Seafood Restaurant, just off the bridge from Longport, where seafood was pristine and the food was marvelous. They were famous for their rum-buns, thick and rich turtle soup, steamed Ipswitch clams and soft-shelled crabs. I had to walk fourteen blocks in each direction, which contributed to my most slender summer on record. I started out washing dishes, because to waitress, one had to be eighteen and I was seventeen. The owner, Chris Mantegna, a feisty Greek, kept several fishing boats in the nearby lagoon, along with two Navy surplus PT boats that had been transformed into tour boats. He always wore his captain's cap with gold "scrambled eggs" on the brim, and spoke in a thick, brisk Greek accent. One busy day, he began to help one of the young men open clams for the many orders of clams on the half shell just as I walked into the seafood bay with a stack of clean trays.
"Here, you, Blondie-girl," he shouted, motioning with his round-edged clam knife for me to join him. "I'm a gonna teach you how to open clams. You scared of knife-ses?"
"Uh, no, Sir."
"Good! Take-a this one and be careful of you fingers. I'm a not gonna take you to the horse-pistol if you slip."
With that, he introduced me to the time-honored art of opening a clam. One holds the clam in the left hand, thumb out, and fingers lightly cupping the bivalve with the hinge side toward the thumb. The round-tipped clam knife is inserted, lengthwise against the two tightly-clamped edges of the clam while the fingers steady the edge and help the knife to separate the two halves of the shell. Once the knife is in the groove, a quick flip of the knife opens the halves, and then the tip is inserted to cut the muscle that holds the halves tightly sealed. A quick twist, and the top comes off and at Chris' was tossed down a metal chute which emptied on the bay waters which flowed under the restaurant. Then the bottom attachment is severed with the tip of the knife, being careful not to dump the "liquor", and the half-shelled clam is put on the ice-lined plate.
It seems that I caught on right away, which pleased my boss to no end. "Look-a her!" he shouted, pointing customers and staff alike in my direction, "Little Blondie was-a born to open clams. What-a ya know about dat!" I cringed and blushed, and people laughed and some even applauded.From that moment on and for the rest of the summer, I was the chief clam opener. Six days a week, over three months, I dumped the top clamshells from innumerable plates of halfshell clams. By the end of summer, the pile of clamshells rose high above the water at high tide, just a few feet from the bottom of the chute. On the last day, just before we all got our "Chris' 67" tee shirts and were taken on the two tourist boats for an offshore party, I got Chris' attention. I pointed down the chute, where the pile of clamshells was clearly visible, and asked, "How many clams do you think I opened this summer?"
"Oh, Blondie, lemmee see," he said, scratching the couple day's worth of gray stubble on his cheek, "maybe one hundred, one and a half hundred thousand, easy." He patted me on the back and leaned closer to whisper, "You don't never tell nobody this, Blondie, but you can open a clam even faster than me, and that's-a damn fast!"
Nearly forty years later, I can still do it practically with my eyes closed, and people who know me and my track record with knives will be astonished to learn that I didn't cut myself once that entire summer.
The restaurant and its charismatic owner are long gone, replaced with resort condos and hotels, but I'll always remembered how I learned to love the salty taste of sweet, fresh clams, and how to make perfect cocktail sauce: One part creamed horseradish to three parts catsup. It couldn't be simpler.
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Comments: 41
Thanks for your summer memory. Good times.
Aileen, thank you. Double thanks for the critique.
Donna, it is an acquired taste, but thanks for hanging in there and reading the whole piece. :-)
WM, I'm happy it touched a chord.
Cheryl, um...oysters are much harder to shuck, I believe one has to hammer away at the closed "lips" to make it easier to insert the knife, and they really strongly hold shut, which is why one is more apt to slip with the blade and get hurt.
My wife and I had relatives in Ocean City and when we visited we normally went somewhere and I had my favorite chowder: Manhattan CLAM chowder. I now live in Massachusetts and up here we feast on Boston CLAM Chowder, but I must admit that my 'taste buds' favor Jersey and Manhattan still -- and I suspect, evermore!
Dick
Jeanie, it was a simpler time, but that was one busy restaurant. There were three dining rooms and a seafood bar where I worked, then men cleaning fish and seafood on the pier, and of course the boat rides.
Martha, thank you. I tend to think that food is nothing without a tale or two to go along with it.
Tina, thank you. I'm glad that you enjoyed it.
That is something that is just as wretched as clams. And draining the puss from an infected wound, that's almost as gross as a clam. Especially after a few days in the humid Louisianna humid heat when you can smell the rotting flesh and effluent dripping from your leg.
I've been perfecting my own white clam chowder, DH's favofite dish, for 30 years.
Will, how can you??? There is nothing a delicatey briny delicious as a plate a raw clams! now I most often eat them at the clam bar at the Reading Terminal market in Philadelphia, or at the Sansome St. Oyster House, but any time i can get some in the summer 'downa shore', they are even better.
I, too, love 'Under the boardwalk', ah, the memories it brings back! ånd how about Al Alberts' 'On the way to Cape May, I fell in love with you..."!
Annina, you write so evoicatively about the Jersey Shore. Ilove it because it brings back memories for me, and I am sure readers from elsewhere get to experience for a moment the magic that is the jersey Shore when they read your writing!
Thanks for the most pleasant "slice" of life ( no pun intended ).
Will, sorry it was a little too trayf for you. OTOH, why you chose to include the next comment is just beyond me. [shrugs]
Donna, I apologize for Will's attempt at barf-induction. He must've had bad barbeque yesterday. However, I'm glad that you liked my article.
Dorine, again, my apologies for Will's, shall we say, bad taste. How cool that the Chatterbox is still there! Let's hear it for being down tha Shore! I'm glad you liked the piece.
Leah, thanks! I like to think I give people a sense of what it was like, and I still am numbed by the notion that it was forty-something years ago. Oh, no! I'm OLD! LOL!
Manette, Thank you, Sis! Wish you could have been there...this will have to do until we get together in realtime. ;-)
Carol, actually, I am reserving this article for a possible sale at a later date. I'm sure you understand, but thanks for asking me to participate.
George, hehehe! I hadn't considered the pun until you said it. :-) Thanks!
Jessie, you'd think that after opening as many as a quarter million, I'd have gotten tired of it, or hated the smell and look of them, but I loved opening them and never tired of it. And I never did buy a surfboard, though I used to borrow one from a hunky guy that summer, if I got out there at the crack of dawn. ;-)
Hope you have a chance to read my short story Bonus on the amazon shorts contest.
Serina, glad you liked it! Remembering was fun too!
Nathan, yes, indeedy...surfing is still popular at the Jersey shore...not the big waves of California, Hawaii or Australia, but big enough to learn on. :-)
Pam, you won't believe it but I never tried oysters until just a few years ago, when my father-in-law came to visit. They were sooo sweet and good, I can't believe it took me that long to try them. I'll bet visiting your dad is a tasty adventure!
Chris, hahaha! Just you wait...I know where you sleep!
Mariana, I bet you'll be surprised if you start recalling some of those summer adventures...it just popped right back in my head after all that time...with details like it had just happened. Just don't ask me where I put my pen five minutes ago! Glad you liked the piece.
Tomasewgood, thanks for commenting. Holding your clam knife? Hahahaha!
Carol, yes, my self-esteem did go up quite a bit, and now that I think about it, that job really was a boost.
Carl, yes, steamed clams are yummy too. The little black-footed Ipswich clams with their chalky, elongated shells were the sweetest, nuttiest clams I ever ate, dipped in drawn butter...yum!
Mona, I did manage to get in some surfing. I wasn't terribly good at it, but learned to stand up. Hehehe!
I grew up on the Chesapeake! Spent every summer of my childhood in either Ocean City, Maryland or Rehobeth Beach, Delaware!
I used to love getting up early in the morning to go clamming with my little plastic buckets! Sometimes my Papa would take me to the Bay and as he fished, my brother and I would crab. We'd take a stick and tie a chicken leg to the end!
I miss those long-necked clams that you can't get anywhere else but the Eastern Shore (we called them "piss clams"!) They used to come in a rickety metal pot and we'd dip em in drawn butter. And I also miss going down to the wharf and getting a bushel of crabs. Nothing I miss more in the summer than hot, spicy crabs and spiced shrimp washed down with cold beers. My favorite seafood beverage is Rolling Rock!
I love those soft-shelled crabs and good crab cakes too. I just went out for Pacific seafood last week. It was good, but just not the same. I did enjoy those raw oysters though -- I ate about a dozen!
I love these personal memories that you share with us! Clams are a risky proposition in the desert - but I like to live on the edge ;) I'm starving for a plate after reading this.
Thanks so much for another great story!