stuffed quahog

July 22, 2020

My Nana and Grandpa, Eileen and Tom Kennedy, lived in Needham, Massachusetts. She was the parish secretary for St. Bartholomew’s Catholic Church, and by the time I was born, he was retired. They had met during World War II and married as soon as possible once it was over. Grandpa was very handy, and built their Needham house himself. During the 1950s and 60s, his work in the wool trade took him all over the world while back home in Needham their family grew. They eventually had eight children. My mother was both the oldest and the only girl.

When my mother was a teenager, Nana and Grandpa bought a summer cottage in Pocasset, a village of Bourne on Cape Cod. My most cherished memories are of spending time with them there. Nana was social and gregarious. It was only one block from the house to the beach but when I was a kid it felt like it took hours to get there as she stopped to chat with everyone we passed. Grandpa was taciturn, and he did not go to the beach. He was a woodcarver and woke up early every morning and spent most of the day working away in his garage workshop. Grandpa’s carvings filled both the Cape house and the house in Needham, and ranged in size and ambition from a mobile of small fish hanging from the ceiling to a magnificent bas-relief rendering of Da Vinci’s The Last Supper. He would listen to Red Sox games on the radio and take a break every day at 1:00 to watch Days of Our Lives.

After dinner we played games – Cribbage and Scrabble, mostly. Grandpa never played – he sat in the next room, reading or watching the Red Sox – but he knew all the rules and was ready to weigh in if there was a scoring dispute.

The best days at the Cape were quahogging days. Every year, Grandpa would get a town shellfishing license and on some days, when the tide was especially low, we would gather the clam baskets and rakes and head to the beach. The best way to find them was to feel around in the muck with your toes, searching for a smooth, hard shell, then to lean in and grab it. There was a metal ring on a chain attached to the basket and only clams that did not fit in the ring were legal to take.

By the time I was a teenager, shucking the quahogs was my job – it was smelly, sticky work but I loved it. Grandpa had devised a sort of clam guillotine with a blade on an arm attached to a wooden base with a rounded groove. You set the clam upright in the groove then brought the blade down through the hinge holding the two shells together.

The meat was destined for clam chowder – thin and just barely milky, with chunks of potato – and for stuffed quahogs. Nana did not follow the recipe included here. Instead, she sautéed onion, then added chopped clams and Pepperidge Farm stuffing mix. She packed the mixture into the washed and dried shells, sprinkled it with paprika, and baked them in the oven.

In 1997, the summer before my senior year of college, I got my first museum job as a guard at Heritage Museums and Gardens in Sandwich, and was able to spend the whole season with my grandparents. Grandpa turned 80 that summer, and Nana was 76, but they were still following the same routine they had for my whole life. Nana had summer hours at the church – she worked Tuesdays and Wednesdays – so they would leave on Monday evening and come back as soon as she was done on Wednesday. She had tried to retire once, but it did not work out for her or the priests!

Grandpa died in 2003 and Nana a year and a half later, on his birthday. After their deaths, Grandpa’s carving of The Last Supper that had hung in their Needham dining room for decades was given to St. Bartholomew’s. The church had it built into a new altar and it is now a prominent feature of the church. Following their wishes, we sold the house in Needham and put the proceeds in a trust for the upkeep of the Cape house. Now, my children and their cousins are the fourth generation of the family to spend winters dreaming of getting back to the Cape and the cottage in Pocasset.

For the past several years, the week of July 4^th has been “my” week at the cottage. This year was no different. Being able to say that about anything in 2020 seems almost miraculous. My grandparents’ cottage in Pocasset has been a place of refuge and calm and wonder for my entire life. I breathe more deeply, more freely there than anywhere. Turns out that is still true even when wearing a mask.

Here are Nana's very simple instructions:

Ingredients:

1 pkg Pepperidge Farm stuffing mix

8 - 10 large quahogs opened and ground up

4 Tbsp. melted butter

2 Tbsp. chopped onion (red onion preferably)

Instructions:

Mix together with extra liquid (hot water) until moist enough to stick together.

Stuff shells.

Bake at 400 degrees for 10 - 15 mins.

Carolin Collins is Education Program Manager at Historic New England,the oldest and largest regional heritage organization in the nation.