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The Local Food Report
As we re-imagine our relationships to what we eat, Local Food Report creator Elspeth Hay takes us to the heart of the local food movement to talk with growers, harvesters, processors, cooks, policy makers and visionaries

Westport's Annual Clambake is an Anthropologically Defining Ritual - and Good Eating Too

Elspeth Hay
Tending the fire at the annual Allen's Neck Clambake, a community ritual since 1888.

Kathy Neustadt believes that how a New England community puts on a clambake is like a window into its soul. She first came to this belief in the summer of 1984 at the annual Allen’s Neck Clambake in Westport.

“I was studying folklore at the University of Pennsylvania, and I said, ‘That sounds like my kind of thing.’ I came, and I was regularly in tears,” Neustadt said, remembering that first clambake. “I just kept going, ‘Oh my god, this is really what cultural rituals are, this is it!’”

The Allen’s Neck clambake has been held on the third Thursday of August every year since 1888. It started as a small Sunday school picnic to benefit the local Quaker meetinghouse, and today, all 500 tickets sell out. It’s the summer’s biggest event.

One hundred and fifty volunteers put on the event at the end of each summer and set it up in a small shady grove. Eight years after Neustadt’s first meal at Allen’s Neck, she wrote a book called Clambake, and went to dozens of clambakes all over New England for research. But no other community she visited does the end of summer ritual quite like the people from Westport.

“They’ve elaborated,” she said. “There are so many little details that aren’t necessary to put on a bake that they do here. And when you scratch the surface you find out everything about the community who these people are who and who their ancestors were and what’s important to them.”

One of Westport’s elaborations is the way they build the fire. Unlike most clambakes, the one at Allen’s Neck isn’t done in a pit. Instead, the rocks are heated up in a crib of logs layered with stones that’s constructed sort of like a log cabin. Just before it’s lit, the pile reaches over 5 feet high. It burns from seven in the morning until 11:30, when a ceremony known as the rake-out begins. Raymond Duvall was the bakemaster—the man in charge of the fire—for over 50 years.

Duvall explained his approach: “Get rid of all that wood first, put that over here in a pile away from where you’re going to work. Then start raking out the stones, half on this side, half on that side. Clean all the ashes out, and then put them back again, to make a flat bed. Then your rockweed goes on top of that, and then your food goes on top of that, and then cover it up with half a dozen canvases. And then you pray it’s going to cook.”

The ritual is totally unnecessary for cooking the food—it could be done just as well in a pit with a lot less work—but because of the conviction and reverence of the participants, it’s deeply moving to watch—it’s almost like a choreographed ritual dance. What’s cooking inside is unusual, too.

“A lot of bakes around put chorizo, or hot dogs,”  Neustadt said.  “They don’t do any of that. And they don’t use lobster. What they want here is clams, clams. They don’t even serve chowder here, because they don’t want to fill you up on liquid. They want the real thing.”

I ask about the lobster—I can’t believe they do a clambake without it—and Neustadt asks me where I grew up. When I tell her Maine, she smiles, and I realize I’ve just strengthened her belief—how someone puts on a clambake really does tell you who they are and where they’re from. At the heart of this though, it isn’t a question of clams or lobster. It’s about the nature of this place and the values of the people who live here.

“This is the chance where they hold a mirror up to themselves,” she said. “They get to see themselves valuing community valuing hard work, cooperation, kindness. This really nurtures people, nourishes people.”

Elspeth has more on the Allen's Neck clambake at her blog,Diary of a Locavore.

An avid locavore, Elspeth lives in Wellfleet and writes a blog about food. Elspeth is constantly exploring the Cape, Islands, and South Coast and all our farmer's markets to find out what's good, what's growing and what to do with it. Her Local Food Report airs Thursdays at 8:30 on Morning Edition and 5:45pm on All Things Considered, as well as Saturday mornings at 9:30.