User:Cullen328/sandbox/Clambake

Author Andew W. German concluded, "There is no question that Native American peoples have been consuming clams for four thousand years but there is little evidence that they prepared them in the traditional New England way. Perhaps they smoked them for preservation, and they probably roasted them in open fires, but neither oral traditions nor early European observations refer to steaming in rockweed. And though we like to imagine the Wampanoags teaching the Pilgrims how to bake clams, there is good evidence that the early European settlers actually eschewed clams as food fit only for the poor, eating them as little as possible."

The 1975 edition of Joy of Cooking, the perennial best selling cookbook first published in 1931, describes two versions of a clambake. The big version is cooked in a sand pit, and the small version is cooked in a large pot on a stove or a grille.

In 1950, the Maine Department of Sea and Shore Fisheries published a 12 page booklet titled "How to Prepare a Maine Clambake with Lobsters and All the Fixin's".

Hammerstein spent a lot of time researching in order to write the lyrics for the song. He consulted over 20 books and spoke to chefs, dialect experts and historians. The book that influenced him most was Mainstays of Maine by Pulitzer Prize winning poet Robert P. T. Coffin. The book included a full chapter about a clambake on a Maine island, with great culinary detail. Many of these details were incorporated into Hammerstein's lyrics, including describing lapping up chowder "with a clamshell, tied onto a bayberry stick."

https://rodgersandhammerstein.com/song/carousel/a-real-nice-clambake/

In 1888, a group of Quakers in Dartmouth, Massachusetts held a clambake, which became an annual tradition that continues today. The event, called the "Allen’s Neck Friends Meeting Clambake", was attended by 625 people in 2017.

According to food journalist Mark Bittman, "Few meals are more beautiful than a well-executed clambake."