Clam Chowder
One peck clams, cut them out raw and chop them, save the liquor; pare and slice eight potatoes and three onions, put them in a kettle with a quart of boiling water, add to the chopped clams and their liquor a piece of butter the size of an egg, and one pint milk, just before serving; boil potatoes and onions until done before putting in the clams. (
A bare-bones New England chowder that assumes you have a bushel basket of hard clams and a cook who knows when to stop. The quantities need translating, and the last two minutes are the whole recipe.
- A peck of clamsA peck is 8 dry quarts, about a quarter bushel — roughly 10 to 13 lb of hard-shell clams in the shell, yielding somewhere near 1 1/2 to 2 lb of shucked meat. If you are buying shucked clams, start with about 2 lb of meat plus 2 cups of their liquor.
- Butter the size of an eggStandard nineteenth-century shorthand for about 2 ounces, or 4 tablespoons.
- Add the clams last, off the boilThis is the hinge. The potatoes and onions cook first; the chopped clams go in at the end and need only two or three minutes at a bare simmer to firm up. Held at a boil they turn to rubber and the broth goes cloudy and grey.
- Don't boil the milk eitherThe pint of milk goes in with the clams, and once it is in the pot the chowder should not come back to a rolling boil. Salty, slightly acidic clam liquor can curdle milk at high heat.
- Strain the liquorShucking releases sand along with the juice. Let the saved liquor settle and pour it off the grit, or strain it through a coffee filter, before it goes into the pot.
- Salt at the endNo salt is called for because the clam liquor supplies it, and the amount varies enormously between clams. Taste after the liquor is in and before you reach for the shaker.
- Chop coarselyThe recipe does not say how fine; a rough cut rather than a mince suits the brief cooking. Bellies can be left whole and the tougher necks cut smaller so everything firms up at the same rate.
- YieldAs written this fills a large stockpot and serves eight to ten as a supper dish. Halving it is straightforward.
Chowder came into English along the New England and Maritime coasts, and the name is generally traced to the French chaudière, the cauldron a fishing crew kept over the fire. What is striking about this version is how much it leaves out: no salt pork, no crackers layered into the pot, no thickening, and emphatically no tomato — just milk, potatoes, onion and butter. It is the sort of thing that could be built from what came off the flats that afternoon and set on the table in the evening with bread.