Fried Clams and Poutine râpée

I recently posted about the lobster and steamed clams and pie from our recent vacation while visiting the Admiral Catnap (retired) and the Admiral Catnap (retired), i.e., my parents. I also want to show other dishes we eat while there. The food is unique to the area and worthwhile seeking out.

Fried Clams

Fried Clams

This is one of the few deep-fried dishes I never fail to get. But since it's usually only once per year, my conscience is clean.

Fried clams are a speciality of the area. I know of half a dozen restaurants which serve them, including a fast-food chain. There are some in south-eastern New Brunswick and in Maine. They are nowhere else in the world, as far as I know. Please let me know in the comments below if you know of any outside this area. I'd love to visit others.

Fred's

The best of all the restaurants my family and I tried is Fred's Restaurant in Cap Pele. It is consistently tops in my own experience, and in the one or two reviews I heard about. The original Fred sold the business many years ago and I don't know if the recipe was his invention or was perfected by one of his successors.

How do they prepare the fried clams?

Fried Clams

They start with fresh clams. They are usually not local to the restaurant's area but are within a couple of hundred kilometres. Nova Scotia is a popular source. The clams are made ready for eating, meaning cleaned of any sand or grit, and shucked. I very rarely get a shell fragment in the clams and never any sand.

They then coat the clams in pancake batter, which may or may not be an insider secret. That's right, their excellent batter is nothing more than commercial pancake mix. Coating the clams is a messy process and involves mixing the clams into the batter using their hands.

From the batter, the clams go into the deep fryer, where they're cooked to perfection every time. The servers wouldn't tell us any secrets to this, similar to how double-frying is best for french fries.

Then from the deep-fryer to the table, a short a trip as possible. When eating deep-fried it's always best to be hot and fresh from the fryer.

Homemade Onion Rings

We get the homemade onion rings for a side. They are just what you expect, rings of onion with batter and deep fried. Mmmmmm, a deep-fried dish to accompany a deep-fried dish. The batter for the rings is different and probably contains some bread crumbs.

We are always a group of four or more and we all love clams, so we end up getting 3 or more platters of clams plus a side of rings. The technique we've hit on is to ask them to bring out the platters one at a time, 10 minutes apart. This way, we share each platter and it ensures a supply of fresh, hot clams for everyone.



Poutine râpée

This dish is more subtle than the fried clams.

Forget everything you know about the Canadian fast food speciality of poutine, the french fries and cheese curds and gravy that's popular in most of the larger cities. The chip wagons serve nice poutine but that's not what I'm talking about.

Poutine râpée

Poutine râpée, despite the similar name, is quite different than poutine. It's an Acadian dish and goes something like this.

They start with cooked pork. Sometimes salted, but the ones we get are not salted pork.  The pork is wrapped in a mixture of potatoes. Part mashed potatoes and part raw grated potatoes. They are about 10 cm in diameter. The balls are boiled for a long time, perhaps an hour or more.

The balls are then served with a little of the cooking water, which now resembles a thin potato gravy. We put them in bowls, and top with fresh-ground black pepper and occasionally hot sauce.

They are a little bland but good. They're a delicious treat worth every bite. The pork looks a bit pink but it is cooked and safe to eat.

We get ours from a small store near Grand-Digue, and it's in the middle of nowhere. We take our own plastic container as we buy enough for everyone.


Next time you're in south-east New Brunswick be sure to seek out these regional dishes. You'll thank yourself.

Steamed Softshell Clams

A plate of the finest

One dish that's always on our list of "must eats" at the cottage is steamed clams.  Or maybe steamed mussels.  But this time, it's clams.

The local clam is the softshell clam.   This batch was larger than we're used to, but they were still tasty and not a bit tough or chewy.  They had more sand and grit that we wanted.  If you get clams that are freshly dug, here's a tip: put the clams in a bucket of fresh seawater and let them sit for a day.  They "spit" their sand as part of their natural filtering process and your meal will be more enjoyable.

Be sure to examine the clams before they're cooked and discard any that the shells aren't tightly closed.  Those could be dead or less than fresh, which don't make for good eating.  Likewise, don't eat any that haven't opened their shells after cooking.  Those probably aren't worth eating either.


Method 1

This is our preferred method these days, where we steam the clams in a large pot.  For this, we need:

The pot and propane burner

• a good supply of clams
• a little bit of fresh water
• a large pot on a good burner
• a slotted ladle
• serving trays
• some melted butter for dipping.  Ideally, everyone should have their own dish
• optional: finely chopped garlic for the butter.  Some like it, some don't
• fresh-ground pepper
• coffee mugs

Simply dump the water in the bottom of the pot.  In our case, it was about a litre of water which barely covered the bottom of the monster pot.  Then we put in the clams and put the pot on the burner and turned it to high.

At the start of cooking

The water will boil and turn into steam which starts to cook the clams. Then, the clams will open enough to release their own liquid, which falls to the bottom of the pot.  This cools the pot slightly and it goes off the boil. But it eventually boils again, and continues cooking.

This is the type of dish I can't put a firm time to cook, as it depends on the size of the pot, the temperature of the burner and the amount of clams you are cooking, but watch them carefully and look for them to open.  That's when you'll know they're done.

Some have opened, others not yet

Scoop them out with a ladle, bring them to the table and make sure everyone has a good supply of melted butter for dipping.  Be sure to remove the outer casing from around the neck.  Otherwise the entire clam is edible.  Watch them disappear.

On the picnic table

A nice accompaniment for the clams is the liquid at the bottom of the pot.  Scoop it into coffee mugs, put a few drops of melted butter and a couple of grinds of black pepper for a delicious drink! We call it dross, though I'm not sure why.  Any dictionary I've seen makes dross sound less tasty than it is.  Salt content is high, though.

A mug of dross

Method 2

We used to do it this way back, quite a few years ago, when the beach still had some sand on it.

We would build a large bonfire in a sand pit using mostly driftwood.  After the fire had burned down to mostly embers, we'd place a large metal mesh on top.  Then, the clams go on top of the mesh and a thick layer of seaweed covers all.  It would take 20 to 30 minutes for the clams to finish cooking this way.

When the clams opened from the heat, they'd drop their liquid onto the embers which created enough steam to cook them.

Then we'd gather them from the mesh and eat.  They'd taste great, although the clams were drier than the first method.