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Clam Chowder (Twenty-five clams with broth)
Twenty-five clams with broth. One carrot, six large potatoes, four onions, one turnip, one bunch of parsley put in last. Butter, pepper, salt, a heaping tablespoon of flour, a few cracker crumbs, and last the chopped clams.
— Mrs. Charles Trowbridge
A village contributor's shorthand: a list of ingredients in roughly the order they go into the pot, with almost no method. The one thing to get right is that the chopped clams go in at the very end and cook only a minute or two.
- The clamsTwenty-five clams in a chowder of this sort most likely means hard-shell clams, quahogs or large cherrystones rather than the small littlenecks sold for eating raw, though the recipe does not say. Steam them open in an inch of water, strain and reserve every drop of the liquor ("broth"), then chop the meats. Depending on size, expect something in the range of 1 1/2 to 3 cups of chopped clam and 2 to 3 cups of broth.
- Clams last, and brieflyChopped quahog turns to rubber in ten minutes of simmering. Add it off the heat or with the pot barely at a simmer, give it a minute or two to warm through, and serve.
- No liquid is specifiedThe clam broth alone will not cover six potatoes. Make up the difference with water or light stock — about 4 cups total liquid — or with milk if you want the New England style; the recipe does not say, and either reading is defensible for the period.
- VegetablesDice the potatoes, carrot, turnip and onions to about half an inch so they finish together, roughly 15 to 20 minutes at a simmer. The turnip and carrot are worth noting: they make this a more vegetable-heavy chowder than the potato-and-onion versions more usually seen.
- Butter and flourQuantities are unstated. Two tablespoons butter with the heaping tablespoon of flour makes a roux that will lightly body 4 cups of liquid. Cook the onions in the butter, stir in the flour, then add the broth.
- Cracker crumbsCrushed common crackers or unsalted-top saltines. The recipe calls for only "a few", stirred in near the end; with the flour already present they read more as body and texture than as the main thickener, and they will soften and give the chowder a slight graininess.
- SaltSalt at the very end. Clam liquor is already saline, and how salty depends entirely on the clams.
- YieldSix large potatoes and two dozen clams make a generous 6 to 8 servings.
Clam chowder recipes of this kind survive in dozens of American church and village cookbooks, and they vary more than the modern shorthand of "New England" versus "Manhattan" suggests. Mrs. Trowbridge's version has no tomato and no salt pork, but it does carry carrot and turnip, and it is thickened with crackers rather than cream. The name is generally traced to the French chaudière, the cauldron, by way of the fishing communities of the Atlantic coast. The compressed, methodless form is characteristic of community-compiled cookbooks like this one: contributors wrote for neighbours who already knew how a chowder was built and needed only the proportions and the order of the pot.