Former SAVEUR editor Kelly Alexander, who covered Clams Casino for our October 2003 issue, pointed readers to Inns and Outs, the 1939 autobiography of Julius Keller, once the maître d’hôtel of Rhode Island’s now-defunct Narragansett Pier Casino hotel. In his memoir, Keller claims to have first served the littlenecks topped with bacon and bread crumbs sometime around 1917, to a patron who had simply requested clams. “Seizing the opportunity,” he wrote, less than humbly, “I prepared a dish which I had tried on my own cultivated palate.”