Like the Carolina pig pickin’, the Yankee clambake is a ritual that goes back to the seventeenth century and continues as a way not only to eat well but to honor regional culinary heritage. Clambakes are featured at large family gatherings, town picnics, political rallies, and seaside fairs. As practiced today, the featured ingredients include not only steamer clams but also lobsters, corn on the cob or corn kernels scraped into the pot with plenty of butter, potatoes, and sometimes sausages and flatfish as well. (Along the southern shore of Lake Erie, around Cleveland, a different kind of clambake takes place in the autumn: It features clams, chicken, sweet corn, and sweet potatoes.)
The Downeast method of cooking is to heat stones in a fire pit constructed on the rocky shore and burn wood down to ashes. The food is then set atop the ashes and hot stones among layers of seaweed and covered with either more seaweed or damp canvas tarps for a couple of hours. It is a tricky procedure to keep the heat relatively stable for that long as well as to layer the food so that it is all ready to eat at the same time; many modern cooks continue to use an open fire but steam the food inside metal pots.
Peaks Island, Maine: a classic clambake on the rocks.