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Clam Chowder with Milk or Tomato
2 Medium-sized Onions 3 Tablespoonfuls Cubed Salt Pork 1 Quart Boiling Water 1 Quart Clams 1 Pint Sliced Potatoes 1 Tablespoonful Flour 1 Tablespoonful Snowdrift 1 Pint Milk, or 1 Pint Canned Tomatoes 2 Teaspoonfuls Salt ¼ Teaspoonful Pepper Put the pork in the soup kettle and slowly try out the fat. Then add the onions, chopped; cook gently for three minutes, add the water and, when boiling, the clams, potatoes, and seasonings. Simmer thirty minutes and thicken with the flour and Snowdrift rubbed together. Then add the milk, or tomato, whichever is used, let cook a few moments and serve.
If desired, a half cupful of corn, or chopped carrot may be added with the potatoes.
A promotional recipe from a shortening company, and a rare printing that offers the milk and the tomato chowder as equal options rather than taking sides. Two things need attention before you cook: the brand-name fat and the treatment of the clams.
- SnowdriftA cottonseed-oil shortening sold by the Southern Cotton Oil Company, apparently the book's sponsor. Any neutral solid fat works in a one-tablespoon roux; butter is the usual modern choice and adds a flavour the original did not have.
- "14 Teaspoonful"A typesetting slip for 1/4 teaspoonful of pepper. Two teaspoons of salt is reasonable for the roughly quart and a half of liquid here, but salt pork and clam liquor both carry salt, so season at the end instead.
- A quart of clamsThis means shucked clams with their liquor. If you start from clams in the shell you will need several pounds to get there; steam them open, save every drop of the liquor, and count it as part of the quart of water.
- Do not simmer the clams thirty minutesThe hinge of the dish. Clams tighten within a couple of minutes of heat and turn to rubber long before half an hour. Simmer the potatoes and onion in the water for the thirty minutes, then add the chopped clams and their liquor in the last two or three minutes.
- "Try out the fat"Render the cubed salt pork slowly over low heat until the fat runs and the cubes are golden. If your salt pork is very salty, blanch the cubes for a minute first.
- ThickeningFlour and fat rubbed together cold is a beurre manié; drop it in in small pieces and stir until it dissolves, or the chowder will be lumpy. One tablespoon of each gives a barely bound broth, not a thick soup.
- The tomato versionCanned tomatoes go in with the same timing as the milk, at the end. Do not combine the two: the acid will curdle the milk. With milk, keep the pot below a simmer once it is in.
- YieldAbout two and a half quarts, serving six as a main course with crackers or pilot biscuit.
Snowdrift was a cottonseed-oil shortening promoted through free and low-cost cookbooks in the early twentieth century, a standard marketing method of the era: the recipes are ordinary American home cooking with the brand name inserted wherever fat is called for. The chowder itself sits on the line of a long regional argument. Clam chowder thickened with milk is associated with New England and with the salt-pork-and-potato base visible here; the tomato version is generally traced to New York and southern New England coastal cooking and is usually called Manhattan clam chowder. Offering both from one set of instructions was the sensible course for a national brand with customers on both sides. The word chowder is commonly traced to the French chaudière, a cooking pot, by way of the fishing communities of the North Atlantic, and the pork-onion-potato-fish combination of this recipe is the oldest part of it.