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Clam Chowder
Rhode Island chowder has the potatoes omitted, and a quart of cider and pint of port are added.
Some add salt pork and potatoes to this, which is a matter of taste, but not orthodox. Milk or cream should not be added, for what affinity is there between milk and clams? It is a frequent combination, it is true, but one that is almost sure to cause indigestion. Take half a peck of hard or soft clams in the shell, which should be well scrubbed before they are opened. Reserve the clam juice, cut off the hard part of whole); put the chopped part in a porcelain-lined kettle with enough water to cover, and cook until they begin to grow tender. Meanwhile peel and slice 2 onions and 6 medium-sized potatoes, and steam a pound of sea-biscuit. When the chopped clams are tender, remove them with a skimmer and put in the potatoes, onions, a pint of tomatoes, all the clams and biscuit in layers; seasoning each with salt, pepper, a little powdered sweet marjoram, savory, and thyme. Then cover all with cold water and cook gently for about twenty minutes, or until potatoes and onions are tender. Before serving season more if liked.
A clear-broth chowder in the Rhode Island manner, built in layers rather than stirred. The measurements are given in market quantities of the 1890s, so a few need translating before you shop.
- Half a peck of clamsA peck is a dry measure of 8 quarts, so half a peck is 4 quarts of clams in the shell; the recipe allows either hard or soft clams, and the weight will vary with their size. Scrub them under cold running water and discard any that stay open when tapped.
- The hard and soft partsClam meat divides into a tough muscle and dark tip and a soft belly. The tough parts are chopped and simmered first because they need the time; the soft parts go in at the layering stage and cook with the potatoes and onions.
- Reserve the liquorThe recipe says to reserve the juice released during shucking but does not say where it goes; strain it through a fine sieve or cloth to catch grit and add it with the covering water. It carries much of the flavour.
- Sea-biscuitHard ship's biscuit, unleavened and only lightly salted if at all. Common crackers or plain water crackers are the nearest survivor; a pound is called for. Steaming softens them so they thicken the broth instead of sitting in it as pellets.
- Porcelain-lined kettleEnamelled cast iron or any non-reactive heavy pot. The instruction is there because bare iron and unlined copper discolour and sour a broth with tomatoes and clam liquor in it.
- Cooking timeTwenty minutes at a bare simmer is for the potatoes and onions, not the clams. Do not let it boil hard: the layers are meant to stay intact and the clam bellies will toughen.
- The cider and portA quart of cider and a pint of port is a great deal of liquid for this quantity — it belongs to the potato-less version described in the first sentence, not to the layered chowder that follows. Treat the two as alternatives rather than adding both.
- YieldAs written this fills a large pot; the recipe itself gives no serving count.
Rhode Island's claim in the chowder argument is a clear broth, sometimes reddened with tomatoes, against the milk-thickened chowder of Massachusetts and Maine. This writer takes the hard line, and the objection — that milk and shellfish together cause indigestion — was a widespread nineteenth-century belief about incompatible foods rather than anything demonstrated; it has no basis in modern nutrition, though it was repeated in print often enough to shape a regional style. The layered construction, with hard biscuit steamed and stacked between potatoes and onions, is associated with ship and shore cookery, where biscuit stood in for flour. In 1939 a bill was introduced in the Maine legislature to outlaw tomatoes in chowder; it was mocked and never passed — a reminder of how seriously these lines were drawn.