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Corn Chowder
1 can corn, 1 cup salt pork cut in cubes, 1 cup potatoes, 1/2 cup chopped onions, salt and red pepper to taste, 3 cups water, 2 cups milk, 1 tablespoon Crisco, 1 tablespoon flour, and 1/2 cup crackercrumbs. Cook salt pork in frying pan for 5 minutes; add onion and cook until a yellow color. Parboil potatoes 5 minutes; add to onion with corn and water; cook 20 minutes. Thicken milk with Crisco and flour cooked together. Combine mixtures; add cracker-crumbs and salt and pepper to taste, then serve.
A straightforward salt-pork chowder from a Crisco promotional cookbook, written when a printed recipe assumed the cook already knew how a chowder behaved. A few of the measures and one of the fats need translating.
- The can of cornThe recipe does not specify a size; period cans ran from roughly 15 to 20 oz, so a modern 15-oz tin (about 2 cups) is a reasonable substitution. Either whole kernel or cream-style works; cream-style will thicken the pot noticeably more.
- Salt porkA cup of cubes is about 6 oz. Render it slowly over medium heat rather than the stated 5 minutes flat — the point is to draw out the fat before the onion goes in, and lean modern salt pork can take 8-10 minutes. Blanch it first if it tastes aggressively salty, and season at the very end.
- CriscoCrisco is vegetable shortening, and this book exists to sell it. Butter gives a better chowder here; you can also skip the added fat entirely and make the roux in a tablespoon of the rendered pork fat.
- Red pepperMeans cayenne, not sweet paprika or bell pepper. An eighth of a teaspoon is plenty in a pot this size.
- Thickening the milkCook the flour in the fat for a minute or two, then whisk in the 2 cups milk off the boil and stir until it thickens. Add this to the vegetables at the end and keep the pot below a simmer — boiled milk in a chowder curdles and catches on the bottom.
- PotatoesA cup diced, about 6 oz. The 5-minute parboil plus 20 minutes in the pot is generous; check at 15 and pull them while they still hold their shape.
- Cracker crumbsPlain soda or oyster crackers, crushed. Stirred in they act as a thickener and largely dissolve; if you want texture, scatter them over the bowls instead.
- YieldAbout 2 quarts, four servings as a main course with bread.
This comes from a cookbook written to promote Crisco, the hydrogenated cottonseed shortening Procter & Gamble introduced in 1911 — which is why a tablespoon of it turns up doing a job butter or the rendered pork fat would do just as well. The chowder itself is far older than the fat: New England chowders built on salt pork, onion, potato, milk and broken ship's biscuit or crackers were being eaten long before corn joined the fish version. The layered method here — render pork, sweat onion in the fat, add starch and liquid, finish with milk and cracker crumbs — is the standard chowder framework, and the crumbs are often said to be a survival of the hardtack that thickened the original shipboard versions, though that is a traditional account rather than a documented line of descent.