February 13, 2014 Razor Clams! My Bulgarian is not good; in fact, it’s almost nonexistent. My husband is out of town for a few days and I’m trying to blog more, drink less, get some exercise, and study Mandarin. Yesterday, though, I got a call from a potential buyer of our car and he sounded really serious, and wants to come by today to look at it (we certainly won’t be taking a car to China!), so I went out to run a few errands before I find myself wheel-less. First stop: the post office, to retrieve our pollution masks I ordered from England. Afterwards, to METRO, the big Austrian Costco-like store out in the suburbs where I can find all sorts of culinary items that I can’t find elsewhere here in Bulgaria — German bread, Italian quail and rabbit, sweetbreads, Spanish cheese, fennel, stalk celery, etc.

I always look at the seafood display, especially now that my Greek fishmonger has closed shop and is replacing it with a gyro stand (albeit with no lamb). I’ve purchased dozens and dozens of French oysters there — luscious gigantic gigas from Sete and  Portugaises from Brittany — as well as Bulgarian mussels from the Black Sea (“midi“), but never had I before seen “бръснач миди” — brusnach midi — there. Or anywhere else, for that matter. I think I may have seen some long skinny clams like these in Paris back in the early 80s. But I honestly don’t  recall — or trust my memory. I also think I may have seen frozen ones in some of the big Asian grocers in the suburbs of Washington, DC, but I don’t buy frozen bivalves. Blame it on my youth spent in the fertile  estuaries of the South Carolina lowcountry.

I tried to read the handwritten  sign on the one netted bag of what looked to me to be razor clams, which I know only from beachcombing, not dining. Reading signs in Cyrillic is hard enough; when they’re written in script, which is very different from print (for example, “m” becomes “t” and “d” becomes “b”), it’s all but impossible for me with my limited knowledge. Letter by letter I spelled out “brusnach,”  pronouncing each letter one at a time, like a small child just learning to read, and I somehow remembered the word for “barber” — “brusnar” (though I’ve never found one here, only stylists) — and laughed aloud at the seafood counter. (Brusnach means razor.) The fishmonger asked me what I wanted, and though there was a gorgeous sole (a sole sole, I could say), I told him I would take the midi. As he was weighing and pricing them, I managed to decipher their place of origin: Холандия. I didn’t pay any attention to the price. I had thoughts of Babette’s Feast and wondered for a moment if I were being silly to buy something I didn’t know and if I were being a bit too indulgent since I knew I would be dining alone tonight. I got home, put the clams on ice, pulled out my trusty Alan Davidson’s North Atlantic Seafood, and grabbed the receipt, which states that I bought .963 kilo (about 2 pounds) of миди дяволски нокът (devil’s claw mussels) for 23.1o leva (about $16). I hope they’re good.

Davidson’s seminal work was released in 1979 and it’s been something of a seafood bible for me ever since, but before I opened it, I searched online for information from the distributor, the 134-year old Thaëron Frères of Belon fame. I salivated looking at all the oysters, mussels, crustaceans, and other mollusks and bivalves they sell (I haven’t had a crab in so long!), and thought of the many times I’ve sat down at brasseries such as Au Pied du Cochon and La Coupole in Paris and eaten huge plateaux de fruits de mer, always ordering every type offered. The label on the clams identified them as Ensis ensis, which Davidson identifies as the razor shell (not to be confused with the razor clams, Ensis directus, of the western Atlantic); the French, “couteau courbé” (curved knife), and the Italian, “cannolicchio fresco” (which translates directly as fresh razor clam), were also noted on the tag, but I surprised there was no date or provenance mentioned.  The Thaëron site doesn’t mention them at all, but they do say that they have “Pieds de couteau” — knife feet (Solen marginatus, which are not curved). Davidson says that all of them are notoriously difficult to harvest, and he gives a humorous account of unsuccessful spoot (the local name for razor shells in Orkney) hunting (or “spooting”) there.

After reading about them for a couple of hours, I think I will just steam them and eat them with a dense, tart poolish baguette from my local French bakery. I tried one raw and it wasn’t very interesting.