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Clam Chowder
Chop fifty clams, peel and slice ten raw potatoes, cut into dice six onions and a half pound fat salt pork, slice six tomatoes (if canned use a coffee-cup full), add a pound pilot crackers; first put pork in bottom of pot and try out, partially cook onions in pork-fat, remove the mass from pot, and put on a plate bottom side up; make layers of the ingredients, season with pepper and salt, cover with water and boil an hour and a half, adding chopped parsley to taste.
A big, tomato-and-pork chowder built in layers rather than stirred, scaled for a crowd. Two things in the original need rethinking: the cooking time and the mysterious plate.
- The plate in the pot"Remove the mass from pot, and put on a plate bottom side up" is ambiguous: it may mean the pork and onions are turned out onto a plate, or that an inverted plate is set in the bottom of the pot and the layers built on top of it. An inverted plate under a long-boiling pot was a known guard against scorching; a heat diffuser or a heavy-bottomed pot does the same work.
- Ninety minutes will ruin the clamsChopped clams need two to three minutes. Layer and simmer the pork, onions, potatoes and tomatoes until the potatoes are tender, roughly 30 to 40 minutes, and stir the clams and their liquor in at the very end. As written the clams come out as gray erasers.
- Fifty clamsThe recipe does not say which kind; hard-shell clams (quahogs or large cherrystones) are the likely intent, which would give somewhere in the range of 2 to 5 lb of shucked meat with liquor depending on size. Shuck over a bowl and save every drop of the liquor for the pot; it is the seasoning. Canned chopped clams with their juice will substitute.
- Try out the pork"Try out" is to render. Dice the half pound of fat salt pork and cook it slowly until the fat runs and the bits are golden, then soften the onions in that fat. Salt pork is very salty, so hold back on added salt until the end.
- Pilot crackersPilot bread, or hardtack, is a dense ship's biscuit still sold in some regions. A pound is a great deal of thickener; common crackers or unsalted saltines work, but use half the weight and expect the chowder to thicken heavily, almost to a pudding, as it stands.
- A coffee-cup fullA coffee cup in books of this period is generally reckoned at roughly a cup, so about 8 to 10 oz of canned tomatoes with their juice in place of the six fresh ones.
- Not a New England chowderThere is no milk or cream anywhere in it. Water, pork fat, clam liquor and tomato make the broth, and the crackers thicken it. Do not add dairy expecting to improve it.
- YieldLikely feeds twelve to fifteen as a main course. Halve everything for a household pot.
Buckeye Cookery was first compiled in Ohio in the mid-1870s (Marysville, 1876/77), with later editions issued from Minneapolis, well inland, and its shell-fish chapter reflects a moment when canned and shipped oysters and clams had become reliably available to Midwestern kitchens by rail. The tomato in this version places it in the New York and coastal-New Jersey tradition of clear, tomato-based clam chowder rather than the milk-thickened New England style. Pilot bread as thickener is the older practice: before flour-and-butter roux became standard, chowders of every kind were bound with layers of broken ship's biscuit, a habit generally traced to fishing and coasting vessels where hardtack was the bread on hand. The instruction to build the pot in layers rather than stir it may likewise be a survival from open-hearth cooking, when a chowder was assembled once and left alone over coals.