Razor Clam Redux

WDFW has posted a news release about a tentatively scheduled razor clam dig this week. If the marine toxin tests are acceptable, Twin Harbors will open for four late-evening digs between February 6-9, while Long Beach will open on Feb. 8 and 9.

A little history about these tests: In the summer of 1961, hundreds of sooty shearwaters, a pelagic bird species that mostly eats fish and comes ashore only to breed, invaded the town of Capitola, California. They attacked people, crashed windows, and wreaked havoc. It is thought that this event inspired Alfred Hitchcock to make The Birds. Scientists speculate the culprit may have been a marine toxin known as domoic acid. The toxin was first discovered in Pacific shellfish in 1991 and led to immediate harvest closures. Razor clam digging in Washington was banned for a year. Domoic acid doesn’t seem to bother the fish and shellfish it infects, but in humans and other animals high up the food chain it enters the brain and warps nerve signals. The human illness is known as amnesic shellfish poisoning and symptoms include headache, dizziness, confusion, loss of short-term-memory, motor weakness, seizures, cardiac arrhythmia, and coma. High doses can even lead to death. There is no antidote.

The toxin is responsible for several deaths in North America. In 1998, 400 California sea lions were killed by domoic acid. State biologists must regularly test razor samplings from up and down the coast before they can announce an opening. So next time you tuck into a juicy fried razor clam, thank your humble state fisheries biologist.

More Thoughts on Razor Clams

My friend Trouthole thinks it's sacrilege to consign razor clams to a kettle of chowder, but I'm from New England originally and there are few higher expressions of good home cooking than a hearty chowder on a winter day. (Don't ask me about Manhattan.) That said, Trouthole has a point. No clam tastes better fried than the razor. I don't want to be overly provincial about this. I'll eat clams from all over the world—Cape Cod quahogs, Long Island littlenecks, New Jersey longnecks, British surf clams, Japanese manilas—but after discovering the meaty bivalve that Northwesterners have known about for millennia (going back to the first inhabitants) I have to concede that the crown goes to the razor.

This is no small claim coming from an uprooted Connecticut Yankee. Let's face it: New England has a monopoly on fried clams and clam shacks. There's a lot at stake here. Fried clams are to New England what barbecue is to the South, and like the barbecue wars, the region has its own family arguments about what constitutes a good fried clam. Generally speaking the clam is dipped in liquid (usually evaporated milk) and then rolled in some sort of flour (breadcrumbs, cornmeal, plain flour, or a combination) before deep frying. Whether or not to include the algae-packed stomach is one of the central squabbles in the tradition (this point being moot with razors, since they must be cleaned before cooking). If the clams are fresh and succulent, few foods compare.

Some will call it heresy, others an indication of how far I've strayed. But I'll say it anyway: fried razor clams are the best. (The photo above was my lunch today: fried razor diggers, or feet, the anatomy of the clam used for digging into the sand, and the tenderest part.) Too often the clams of the East Coast, especially if not dug and shucked that day, are unobtrusive enough that a person with no particular love of clams—or an abiding taste for Styrofoam—can order a basket without fear for his undiscerning palate. Granted, the conditions of the clam shack where he orders that basket will be far superior to the simulacra we have here on the West Coast. But history and atmosphere notwithstanding, I still urge my Compatriots of the Clam from Ipswich and Essex, from Narragansett and Kennebunkport, to journey west and try a fresh razor clam in its native habitat. These golden beauties are positively ebullient with the essence of clam, the experience not unlike gulping down raw oysters: a sweet, delirious taste of the sea.

One last thought: razor clamming reminds me of that great Henry Weinhard's beer commercial from several years back. A bunch of young slackers are on the dunes drinking Henry's. Goatees, lots of plaid. "Here come the hotties," one announces. Cut to a shot of the wind-swept beach with a cold, gray ocean backdrop—and a bunch of girls clad not in bikinis but in so many layers of foul-weather gear that they look like nothing so much as the Michelin tire man. Ah, the Northwest.

Honey, Get the Gun

The Ace Hardware in Ocean Shores, WA, had guns galore. You might say it was going great guns. I picked out a nice gray one, gun-metal gray, in fact, and then drove to the Porthole Pub for a bacon cheeseburger. An hour later the rain stopped and a few rays of sun snuck through the clouds—not that the weather would stop anyone today. By 2 p.m. the beach was already crowded. We drove out onto the hardpan sand like everyone else. Low tide was 3:58 p.m. I put my boots on, got the gun out, and wandered down among the people. The hooting and hollering had already begun. I took aim and fired.

Open season on razor clams!



Like Noodling for flatheads in the Delta, running a sap line in New England, or dropping a baited hook through a hole in the ice in the Great White North, digging razor clams is a peculiar and time-honored expression of regional identity. Golden-hued and shaped like a straight-edged razor, the Pacific razor clam (Siliqua patula, for “open pod”) makes its home along the sandy, storm-tossed beaches of the Northwest, from Pismo, California, to the Aleutian Islands of Alaska, where they earn a living filtering plankton, particularly a species of diatom known as Attheya armatus.

Both humans and grizzly bears have a powerful taste for razor clams. Which brings us back to the clam gun. An ingenious device. Nothing more than a humble length of PVC or metal tube with a handle attached. Lacking a grizzly's sharp claws and hump of back muscle, the human clam digger must strike a pose with his gun like a hard hat-wearing jackhammerer, then work his tube several inches down into the wet sand before closing a vent on the handle. With suction he can now pull up a core of sand—and, if he’s skilled, a razor clam secreted within.

Overkill, you say? Razor clams are fast. Go ahead and laugh. Reports vary, but one researcher clocked a razor clam burying itself at a rate of an inch per second. At that pace, I refuse to entertain snide remarks about fair chase. These tubes are by far the weapons of choice for extracting the clams. Wherever you go you hear clammers referring to their “guns,” but in truth the term was originally coined to describe a small, angled shovel invented in the 1940s and used for the same purpose, and there are old-school clammers who will eagerly correct you if you call your tube a gun. But everyone does, and so did I.



A limit of razor clams (15 per day in Washington state) may not seem like a lot on paper, but these clams can be monstrous, and one with a six-inch shell surely has more meat on it than a small quail. (The clams to the right, both shucked and one cleaned, are just average sized.)

For both fish and clam chowders I hew closely to the classic New England recipe outlined by Mark Bittman in How to Cook Everything, which happens to be the same recipe used by my grandmother Mimi on the Cape, although unlike both Bittman and Mimi, I prefer using a generous roux of melted butter and flour to thicken the chowder. However, I’ll never go back to my earliest love of the whipped and creamy style so thick you can spread it on toast points, not since working in my youth at a Martha’s Vineyard restaurant famous for its chowder. Between us, that miraculous, float-a-cherry-on-top creaminess didn’t come from any particular technique or wizardry in the kitchen; it came from giant cans labeled “Chowder Base.”