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Clam Chowder (Fifty hard-shell clams medium)
Fifty hard-shell clams (medium size); strain juice, add one quart of water, one-fourth pound of fat salt pork cut up and browned in bottom of pot before anything is added; six mediumsized potatoes, two onions (chopped), one can of tomatoes, celery, parsley, pepper and salt to taste. Cook pork and vegetables and clam juice two and one-half hours; add clams twenty minutes before serving.
— Mrs. F. T. Beach
A tomato-based chowder of the kind later called Manhattan style. The recipe assumes you are shucking your own clams and reserving every drop of liquor, which is where nearly all the flavor lives.
- The clamsFifty medium hard-shells means quahogs or large cherrystones, yielding roughly 3 cups of meat and 2 to 3 cups of liquor. Open them raw over a bowl, or steam them just until they gape, and strain the juice through a doubled cheesecloth to catch sand.
- Cut the clams before they go inHard-shell clam meat has a tough foot and neck. Chop it fine or run it briefly through a food processor, otherwise no amount of simmering will make it tender.
- Twenty minutes is too longTwenty minutes is longer than the clams need -- they tighten and turn rubbery within a few minutes of heating. Add them off the boil at the very end and give them 3 to 5 minutes, no more; if you steamed them open they were already partly cooked.
- Two and a half hoursA simmer this long suits a wood or coal range, where a pot could be pushed to a cooler part of the top. On a modern burner a much shorter simmer, roughly 45 minutes at a bare simmer, will do. If you do go the full time, hold the potatoes back for the last half hour or they will dissolve.
- Salt porkA quarter pound of fat salt pork, diced small and rendered until the bits are brown, is the base. Unsmoked pork belly or fatty pancetta will do. Leave the cracklings in the pot.
- Unmeasured seasoningsCelery and parsley are given without quantity: two or three stalks of celery diced with the onions, and a small handful of chopped parsley stirred in at the end. Salt last of all, since the clam liquor and the pork both carry a good deal.
- YieldAbout three quarts, enough for six as a main course with crackers or pilot biscuit.
Tomato in clam chowder marks this as a coastal-New York and southern-New England habit rather than a Boston one, and the split between milk chowder and tomato chowder was already a matter of local pride. The word chowder is usually traced to the French chaudiere, a cauldron, though that derivation is traditional rather than documented. Commercially canned tomatoes were cheap and widely available by the end of the nineteenth century, and they let a household well inland from the shore build a chowder without needing fresh cream or a coastal market. A long simmer of this kind belongs to the wood or coal range, where a pot could be pushed to a cooler part of the top.