Chopped hard or surf clams are seasoned and turned into clam fritters or clam balls, meaty clam cakes, clam hash and Italian-style clam sauce for spaghetti or linguini. On Block Island off the coast of Rhode Island, a white clam sauce flavored generously with garlic is also served over flounder fillets at Ballard's Inn at Old Harbor (401-466-2231).

Clams are baked or broiled on the half shell either whole and topped with a patch of bacon or chopped and seasoned. Tiny, nut-sweet steamers are as easy to consume in unconscionable quantities while sitting on the waterfront deck of Barnacle Billy's on Perkin's Cove in Ogunquit, Me. (207-646-5575), as at the fashionable new no-frills seafood houses such as Legal Seafoods, 35 Columbus Street in Boston (617-426-4444).(There are other locations in Cambridge, the Chestnut Hill Mall and Worcester.) Some of the best places in New England for clam cakes, fried clams and chowders are rough-hewn roadside stands, like the Seafood Shack, Route 1A in Narragansett, R.I. (401-783-1755), the Sand Bar at the Point in Old Saybrook, Conn. (203-388-3243) or Lighthouse Seafood, Route 6, Rehoboth, Mass. (617-336-8218). The stands are usually open during the summer season only.

The English who settled in New England were city folk, not farmers or fishermen, and for them gathering clams from the shore was easier than learning to fish, so clams became known as Pilgrims' bread. Edward Winslow, who arrived on the Mayflower, wrote of the abundance of clams ''at their doors.''

The members of the Algonquin tribe who showed the tenderfoot settlers how to forage for their food also introduced them to the clambake, a ritual cooking of corn, clams and other seafood on the beach over hot seaweed, New England's answer to the Texas barbecue. No one has expressed the pleasure of it better than Rodgers and Hammerstein in ''Carousel'':

Then at last came the clams, steamed under rockweed and popping from their shells.

Just how many of them galloped down our gullets, we couldn't say ourselves! It was a real nice clambake. The National Marine Fishery Service classifies three types of clams for New England: hard, surf and soft. In terms of volume, the surf or ocean clam was the most important category in 1985, yielding 9,676,000 pounds of meat, 80 percent of which came from Massachusetts waters. Hard clams had the highest dollar value, however: $21,789,000, with Narragansett Bay in Rhode Island the main source of supply. The soft clam industry is centered in Maine.

Within these three main categories there are subdivisions, often relating to the size of the clams:

Hard clams. New Englanders call hardshell clams quahogs (pronounced co-hog), a term derived from the Narragansett word poquauhock or round clam. The scientific name for the hard clam is Mercenaria mercenaria (formerly Venus mercenaria), an appropriate term because the purple-tinged shells of these clams were highly valued by the Indians as wampum. The sizes are regulated in some areas according to either the thickness or the diameter of the shell, but the grading systems are not uniform. ''It's tough to tell which is which from place to place,'' said Jeff Skalinski of Turner fisheries in Boston.