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Fish Chowder
1 white fish weighing 5 pounds, 4 cups potato dice, 1/2 cup onion dice, 1/2 cup salt pork dice, salt, pepper, and red pepper to taste, 4 cups hot water, 2 tablespoons Crisco, 4 tablespoons flour, 4 cups milk, and 10 buttered crackers. Remove head and skin and cut fish into fillets. Cover head, skin and bones with cold water; simmer 20 minutes, strain. Reserve liquor. Parboil potatoes 10 minutes. Cook onion in salt pork until yellow. Arrange in layers, fish, potatoes, onions and salt pork; cover with water in which bones were cooked, and simmer until potatoes are tender. Thicken milk with Crisco and flour cooked together, combine mixtures, add seasonings, and pour over buttered crackers which have been previously soaked in cold milk. Do not allow onion or salt pork to burn.
A conventional New England chowder built in layers, with a milk-and-roux finish instead of straight scalded milk. The quantities are generous: figure eight to ten servings.
- The fish"White fish" here means any lean white-fleshed fish sold whole — cod, haddock, pollock, hake. A 5 lb whole fish yields roughly 2 to 2 1/2 lb of fillet, so buy accordingly if you are starting with fillets, and ask for the head and frame to make the stock.
- CriscoThis book was published by the makers of Crisco to promote it, which is why shortening appears where an older chowder would use butter or rendered pork fat. Butter is the better choice for the roux; use it measure for measure.
- The stock is not optionalThe 20-minute simmer of head, skin and bones is what separates this from fish boiled in water. Strain it well — a fine sieve or cheesecloth — and skim before using, since the strained liquor is the entire cooking liquid for the layered pot.
- Do not boil after the milk goes inOnce the thickened milk meets the fish, hold the pot below a simmer. A rolling boil curdles the milk and shreds the fillets, which by then are already cooked through.
- Timing on the fishThe instruction to simmer until the potatoes are tender assumes potatoes parboiled 10 minutes; they will finish in another 10 to 15. Thick fillets need only 8 to 10 minutes, so lay them on the bottom of a pot no deeper than necessary and check early.
- Red pepperCayenne, not paprika or chilli flakes. A pinch is enough in a pot this size — the point is warmth behind the salt pork, not heat.
- The crackersPeriod recipes generally mean common crackers or pilot biscuit: hard, dry rounds that hold their shape when soaked. Unsalted saltines or oyster crackers stand in, but soak them briefly, seconds rather than minutes, or they collapse.
- AssemblyThe chowder is poured over the soaked crackers rather than stirred into them; the recipe does not say whether that happens in a tureen or in individual bowls. The crackers will thicken the liquid as it stands.
A Calendar of Dinners belongs to a genre of cookbooks written to sell a product — in this case Crisco, the hydrogenated cottonseed shortening introduced in 1911, which explains its appearance in a chowder where a New England cook would have reached for butter or the fat from the salt pork. The dish itself is much older than the book: chowder is generally traced to the fishing communities of the North Atlantic, and the name is usually linked to the French chaudière, the cauldron a crew cooked in, though that etymology is traditional rather than settled. The salt pork, the layering, the hard crackers soaked and laid in the bowl, and the milk added at the end are all marks of the New England form, distinct from the tomato-based chowders of the mid-Atlantic coast. The roux is the least traditional element: thickening the milk with flour and fat gives a body that many older versions got from crumbled crackers alone, though flour-thickened chowders were already in print in the nineteenth century.