Serving Bowls for Salads, Sashimi, Sauces,Candy and a Variety of Other Uses

Pacific Islanders have long known that giant clam shells make excellent serving bowls. Even today, many modern visitors to tropical island areas love to take home tridacnid shell bowls as souvenirs. Few gifts from the tropics are more beautiful, durable or functional. Now that clam hatcheries and farms are operating in many areas of the Pacific, captive-bred shell bowls represent a marvelous, environmentally sustainable market opportunity.

Nearly all of the giant clam species may be fashioned into dishes or bowls of some sort. T. gigas, T. derasa and H. porcellanus (China clams) are especially favored for larger bowls, while shells of the other, smaller species may be used for individual serving dishes.

For shells that will be used to serve food, whether salads, vegetables, sashimi, sauces or candy, special care should be taken to clean the specimens chemically to achieve the cleanest possible surface on both the inside and outside of the shells. For the predominantly white tridacnid shells (T. gigas, T. derasa, T. squamosa, T. maxima and T. crocea), sun drying should be followed by chemical bleaching and light grinding of the lip to remove nicks and sharpness. The cleaning process for shells of the colorful clam species, including H. hippopus and some H. porcellanus, should include sun drying, chemical bleaching and a brief acid dip; the shell lip should then be ground.

In making shell bowls and dishes, perhaps the most serious question confronting the crafter is how to make the shells sit flat on the table. It seems that when customers see a shell bowl for sale, the first thing they do is press on it to see if it wobbles! Obviously, bowls that wobble won't sell as easily. Two practical options exist to make the shells sit firmly on the table. One is to grind off part of the rounded umbonal area of the shell. This may be the best approach for smaller specimens. However, sufficiently grinding the umbonal of larger specimens is a very time-consuming process, and for that reason, it is generally not cost-effective.

If grinding the base of the shell is not practical, the second option is to use some kind of supplemental base that will keep the shell bowl flat and possibly even add value to it. Obviously, it is most desirable for island-based operations to use locally produced materials whenever possible. Bamboo is a raw material that is available on many Pacific islands. An attractive and functional shell base (Figure 17) can be made by cutting rings from a stout piece of dried bamboo. The rings should be about 1 inch thick and about 4 inches in diameter.

A large number of rings can be made quickly with a power cutoff saw. Sometimes called “chop saws,” these neat tools are used by construction contractors to size lumber for framing houses. Chop saws cut bamboo rings like a knife slicing through butter.

Caution: Chop saws can lop off fingers just as easily as they cut bamboo, so they must be approached with the utmost respect.

Alternatively, the bamboo rings can be cut with reasonable ease with a hand saw, which is certainly a less risky approach. Apart from lightly sanding with fine sandpaper to remove splinters and roughness, no further processing of the bamboo rings is needed. Simply place one under a shell bowl and maneuver the bowl until it sits flat.

Figure 18 represents a typical serving dish arrangement. A large, 30-centimeter T. derasa bowl with a bamboo ring base is used as the main serving dish, and four to six smaller T. derasa shells, each about 15 to 16 centimeters long, are used as individual serving dishes. Note that the smaller dishes are not presented with bamboo bases; the umbonal area was flattened with a grinding wheel. A serving set of this type would retail for $20 to $35, depending on shop location.