Cooking Clams

The tiniest clams, vongole in Italian, are classically cooked in a rich tomato sauce and served in their shells with spaghetti. This looks pretty, but extracting the flesh is a bit of a bore. On the Eastern seaboard of the USA, clam chowder is the most famous treatment, a milky broth thickened with crumbled crackers and enriched with lardons of fat bacon. The simplest treatment is the one to choose for a start point. You need about 200