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Fish Chowder
Take a trout or any large fish, skin it and cut the meat in nice thin slices; take some slices of salt pork and fry it quite brown; slice two medium-sized onions and fry with the pork; slice some potatoes-then put in a layer of potatoes, fish, onions, cracker dust. Continue until ingredients are all used; add to it red and black pepper, place bits of butter on the top, then pour on milk enough to cover it, and cook until well done.
A layered, milk-based chowder built in the pork fat rather than a soup stirred in a pot. The whole thing turns on gentle heat: milk poured over raw potatoes and fish will curdle or scorch if the pan is pushed hard.
- Heat, not timeKeep the pan at a bare simmer, covered, on the lowest workable burner. Milk over direct high heat will break and the layer of potato touching the pan will catch before the top is cooked.
- How long "well done" isHow long 'well done' is -- Thinly sliced potatoes will want roughly 20-35 minutes at a simmer, depending how thick they are cut; test them rather than timing. The fish is done long before that, so slice it thin as directed and expect it to fall into flakes.
- Cracker dustCrushed unsalted soda or oyster crackers, ground fine; the recipe gives no quantity. A modest handful per layer is enough, and they thicken the milk as they swell. Panko is too coarse and too bland a substitute.
- Salt porkFatty cured side pork, sold near the bacon. Unsmoked is closer to the original; blanch it a minute if it is very salty. Four to six ounces gives enough fat to fry the onions and enough salt that little extra is wanted.
- Red and black pepperRed pepper here means cayenne, not paprika or a fresh chile. A pinch, plus a generous grind of black.
- The fishFreshwater trout was the assumption; any firm-fleshed fish works, and cod, haddock or pollock are the classic New England choices. Allow 1 1/2 to 2 lb skinned fillet and pull the pin bones, since the recipe gives no chance to fish them out later.
- MilkWhole milk, enough to just cover the top layer as the recipe directs. Skim is more likely to break under heat, so whole milk is the safer choice.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantities; scale it to the pan and the fish you have. Let it stand off the heat ten minutes before serving so the crumbs finish thickening.
Many nineteenth-century American chowder recipes are assembled in layers like this rather than simmered as a broth, and salt pork and biscuit crumbs recur throughout the form; the name is traditionally traced to the French chaudière, a cauldron, though that derivation is customary rather than documented. Where this recipe departs from the familiar coastal version is in reaching for a trout, where the fish in hand was whatever came out of a lake or river rather than off a wharf. Cracker dust also tells you something about the period pantry: soda and oyster crackers were a common staple and their broken remains were used as a thickener, doing the work that a flour roux or canned soup would do in a twentieth-century kitchen.