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Clam Chowder
Remove heads from 4 cups clams and chop. Parboil 4 cups potatoes. Cook 1 chopped onion and 1/2 cup salt pork cut in cubes 15 minutes. Arrange clams, potatoes, onion and pork in layers in saucepan; cover with 3 cups boiling water, and simmer till tender. Blend 3 tablespoons Crisco with 2 tablespoons flour, add 4 cups scalded milk and stir till boiling; add clam mixture, seasonings to taste, 1 dash of Tabasco sauce, and serve hot.
A straightforward New England-style chowder from one of the Crisco promotional cookbooks, written when shortening was the novelty ingredient being sold. A few of its instructions assume clams and a kitchen that no longer look the way they did.
- "Remove heads from 4 cups clams""Remove heads from 4 cups clams" is usually read as referring to soft-shell (steamer) clams, whose long siphon or "neck" carries a tough black skin that is peeled off, along with the dark stomach mass. If you use hard-shell clams (quahogs, cherrystones), simply shuck them, separate the tough adductor muscle from the soft belly, and chop the tough part finely.
- Quantity of clamsFour cups of shucked clam meat is roughly 2 lb, which means a great many clams in the shell; yields vary widely with species and size. Buying shucked clams by the pint from a fish counter is far less work.
- Save the clam liquorThe recipe calls for 3 cups boiling water and never mentions the juice released in shucking or steaming. Strain that liquor and use it as part of the 3 cups; without it the chowder is noticeably thin in flavour.
- CriscoCrisco is still sold, and this book exists to advertise it. Butter can be used in the same amount, though it carries water as well as fat and so is not a strictly equal exchange; the roux is only a thickener for the milk.
- Do not boil the clams longThe layered pot is simmered "till tender," which really applies to the potatoes and pork, not the clams. Clam meat turns rubbery in a few minutes, so simmer the potato, onion and pork until the potato is soft, then add the chopped clams for the last two or three minutes.
- Scalded milkScalding means heating to just below the boil, about 180F, until it steams and shows a ring of bubbles at the edge. Once the clams and their liquor go in, keep the pot below a boil or the milk may separate.
- SaltSeason only at the end. Salt pork and clam liquor between them supply a good deal, and the recipe leaves it entirely to taste.
- YieldRoughly 3 1/2 to 4 quarts by the volumes given, enough for eight generous bowls as a main course.
This comes from a Crisco recipe book of the 1910s, issued after the shortening was introduced in 1911; the point of such books was to show a hydrogenated vegetable fat doing the everyday work of butter and lard, which is why Crisco appears in a chowder that has no real need of it. The dish itself is the standard milk-based clam chowder of the northeastern United States, built on the older French and English pattern of a chaudière, the cauldron in which fishermen cooked what they had in layers — the word chowder is generally traced to that source. The salt pork, onion, potato and milk sequence was already fixed in American cookbooks by the mid-nineteenth century; what marks this version as early twentieth-century is the dash of Tabasco, a commercial bottled sauce that by then had become ordinary pantry stock.