The soft-shell clam makes a delicate stew or broth. The tough parts should be rejected from the chopping bowl. Boiled for twenty minutes and eaten from the shell with a little butter and pepper they are also very appetizing. A big potful soon disappears.
There is no excuse for the yachtsman neglecting to enjoy the delights of fish fresh from the sea. Fishing tackle should always be carried. Bluefish and mackerel may be caught by trolling; and if you have fisherman's luck, once in a blue moon a Spanish mackerel may fall to your lot. If so, that day must be marked by a white stone, for a Spanish mackerel transferred in about two shakes of a lamb's tail from the fish-hook to the fry-pan, or better still, if your arrangements permit, to the gridiron or broiler, is good enough for the gods to feed on. Two axioms should be borne in mind, namely, to fry in plenty of boiling fat or to plunge into boiling water. Never humiliate a fish by placing him in a cold fry-pan or into a cooking pot of cold water.
Before frying fish dip in well-beaten egg and then sprinkle with bread crumbs or cracker dust, dip in egg again, and then add more bread crumbs or cracker dust. This is for epicures. For ordinary seafarers if the fish is rolled in yellow cornmeal without the egg the result will be nearly the same. Cut up large fish into suitable sizes, but fry small fish whole.
Soft-shell crabs should be cooked in boiling fat. When brown they are done. Ten minutes is usually enough to cook them thoroughly.
Always when you boil fish of any kind indigenous to salt water or fresh put them in boiling water either from the sea or fresh water well salted. A little vinegar added is good. A two-pound fish should cook sufficiently in fifteen or at most twenty minutes. Fish with white flesh take longer to boil than those with dark.
An excellent sauce for boiled fish may be made thus: Put a piece of butter as big as an egg in a saucepan or a tomato can; heat till it bubbles, add a heaping tablespoonful of flour, stir till quite smooth; pour slowly into this, stirring continually, a pint of the water the fish was cooked in, and add two hard-boiled eggs chopped fine. This may be flavored with anchovy sauce or a few drops of Harvey or Worcestershire. Some prefer the addition of a little lemon juice or even vinegar. Every man to his taste!
When a very little boy I sailed in the Derwent, a small schooner engaged in carrying bottles from Sunderland to London. The bottles were taken in from the factory where they were made, stowed in the hold of the schooner and transported to a wharf at Wapping. Bottles are a clean kind of freight, and our skipper being a very particular kind of a man the Derwent was kept as bright as a new pin outside and inside, alow and aloft. On this dashing little vessel I was cook and cabin boy. There was no regular galley on deck, simply an iron cooking stove erected on the foreside of the mainmast; and on that in storm and calm I boiled and baked for a crew of four for more than a year—in fact till I quit the coasting trade and signed away foreign. My skipper took me under his special guidance. The grub had to be well cooked and the deck kept spotless or I used to suffer. Skipper and mate were epicures after a fashion, so I had to keep my weather eye open.
My experience in merchant vessels and pleasure craft has fitted me to write with some small assumption of authority on the subject of sea cooking.
Some of my methods may seem queer and perhaps grotesque, but condemn them not till you have tested them in the crucible of experiment.