A Guide to Clam Types and What to Do With Them

When plucked from their shells, clams might not win any beauty contests, but their briny bite and bouncy chew create a covetable combination that works in a wide variety of dishes in cuisines around the world. On top of that, not one single type of clam widely available in the US lands in the Monterey Bay Aquarium Seafood Watch’s red "avoid" category of sustainability, which means that you can enjoy your pasta alla vongole or clams casino with a clear conscience. As filter feeders, clams even help clean up their environment, clearing out any toxins from the water as they bubble about in tidal flats and dig deep into beaches with their powerful muscles.

Those muscles—and what they do—gave the mollusk its name. According to Jay Jacob’s exhaustive book on the origin of food words, The Eaten Word, the word "clam" comes from an old form of "clamp," which, when used in its full form—the name "clamshell" ("clampshell")—describes how tightly the mollusk shuts. That, unfortunately, is about as close as we can get to defining what a clam is or isn't. The Oxford Companion to Food points out that, while the name should refer only to bivalves that can close their shells completely, this definition actually eliminates a few accepted clam types (razors, for example) and includes oysters and mussels. But we’re here to talk more about consuming clams than their confusing nomenclature.

We know from the piles of ancient shell remains lining coasts around the world that clams have been eaten for centuries, if not millenia. And for good reason: They are abundant, tasty, and healthful (full of iron and vitamin B). This is true even of the types of clams that aren’t commonly eaten, whether because they are endangered, like the giant clam; not worth the work, as with the horse clam’s high ratio of tough skin to edible meat; or only circumstantially inedible, because of seasonal or geographic diseases, like butter clams, which hold toxins for many years.

Most of the time, though, clams in the US are edible, as the Europeans landing on New World shores learned quickly from indigenous peoples, who had long been eating a version of what is now known as clam chowder. And Europeans also discovered that the shells were valued by Native Americans in the Northeast: polished and shaped quahog clamshells denoted specific achievements, status, and wealth, and as they were used to barter with European colonists, they came to be interpreted as a form of currency, which in turn led to the eventual use of the term “clams” to mean US dollars.

The abundance of clams in this country means that most clams don’t cost too many clams, as it were, making them a quintessentially American food that is as affordable as it is accessible. But we here in the US do miss out on a few international species. The FDA bans importation of blood clams from Southeast Asia, as their low-oxygen environments can make them carriers of diseases like hepatitis and typhoid. (They can occasionally be found in New England, though, and can be imported from Mexico.) Shijimi, a brackishwater Japanese clam thought to be a hangover cure and often used in miso soup, is classified as an invasive species in the US and is rarely found other than in packaged miso soups or frozen.

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