Clam dip and chips, and other comforts

New Year's has never been my favorite holiday. I never really got into the party thing, and a day of college football is not my idea of nirvana, either. What made up for it was my mother's tradition of Coca-Cola (a rare treat in my childhood), potato chips and dip — French onion for her, and clam for me.

Somewhere along the line, clam dip went from balm for a boring evening to balm for all sorts of blues. When I moved away from home, a bag of Ruffles and the familiar small tub of dip — salty, creamy and punctuated by chewy bits of clam — was more than an occasional dinner on a melancholy weeknight.

Nor is it my only comfort food. Combination fried rice lifts my spirits, as does brown sugar cinnamon Pop-Tarts. And it's a good thing, too: It's nearly impossible to find clam dip now.

There's plenty of spinach dip, which is too close to healthy to be of much comfort. Bean dip doesn't do anything for me either. There's even still my mother's favorite, French onion. But no clam.

Not for lack of bivalves, I would think. One can find plenty of chowder on the supermarket shelves. Clam juice for cooking is a bit rare, but I figure that's more for lack of demand. I guess there's even less demand for clam dip.

It's a shame, too. Of all the legal, ingestible escapes from reality, I consider this one of the more benign. Liquor is quicker, as they say, but it carries well-known drawbacks. It comes in a small enough container that even if you ate the WHOLE DARN THING, you'd be better off than if you ate a whole carton of Haagen-Dazs. Which — admit it! — has been known to happen.