Clam Cakes 文蛤饼
Clam Cakes is featured among the local specialties of Jiangsu.
Clam Cakes (文蛤饼) are small pan-fried cakes of chopped hard clam meat, a well-known snack of Nantong (南通) in Jiangsu. Nantong's wenge (文蛤) clams are known as the "freshest thing under heaven" (天下第一鲜) and were once sent to the imperial court as tribute. A local saying claims that after eating clam cakes, every other flavour loses its taste.
How it is made
In the recipe given by Shangguan News, cleaned clam meat is chopped and mixed with lean pork and cooked pork fat minced together, water chestnuts crushed with the flat of a knife, ginger, spring onion, salt and cooking wine. Eggs go in next, then wet starch and flour. The mixture is pressed by hand into cakes and fried in a hot pan until both sides are golden. A splash of bone stock and cooking wine is added and the pan is covered briefly; the lid comes off to let the steam escape, and sesame oil is stirred through before the cakes are served.
An Ourjiangsu essay on Nantong clams describes the modern cakes as thin rounds about the size of an egg. Its writer prefers loofah to water chestnut in the mix, pairing the loofah's clean taste with the richness of the clam.
Flavour and texture
The cakes come out golden. Shangguan News describes them as soft and tender with a light fragrance and an unusually savoury taste, while the Ourjiangsu writer calls the fried rounds crisp and full of flavour.
Where it comes from
Nantong has plenty of clams, and the writer of the Ourjiangsu essay counts cakes as the most traditional way to eat them, quoting the cookbook Suiyuan Shidan (随园食单), which tells cooks to pound a clam called che'ao (蛼螯) into cakes and fry them like shrimp cakes. A Shangguan News report on a 2020 Jiangnan food festival lists a "jade" clam cake (翡翠文蛤饼) among Nantong's specialty snacks.
Sources & reading
Written from the linked sources and checked sentence by sentence against quoted extracts by a separate reviewer on 2026-09-24. Recipes and servings vary between kitchens.