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Potato Chowder
5 medium-sized potatoes; 3 thin slices of bacon, 1 pint milk, 1 medium-sized onion; 2 teaspoonfuls Worcestershire sauce; 1 tablespoonful flour; 1 tablespoonful butter; 1 teaspoonful salt; 1/4 saltspoonful pepper; a dash of cayenne.
Pare the potatoes, slice them one-third of an inch; then cut in squares one inch or so across, throw them in cold water. Slice the onion, cut the bacon in dice, and fry together to a delicate brown. Drain the fat into a deep saucepan, put in the potatoes, distributing the crisped bacon with the salt and pepper through them. Nearly cover with boiling water and cook with out stirring until the potatoes are tender, which will take fifteen or twenty minutes.
Rub the flour and butter together, add the hot milk, blend well; stir it carefully into the chowder, taking care to break the potatoes as little as possible. Let it boil until the flour is cooked, add the Worcestershire sauce with hot toasted crackers.
A plain milk-and-potato chowder built on bacon fat rather than salt pork, thickened at the end with a butter-flour paste. It comes together in about half an hour.
- Do not stir while the potatoes cookThis is the hinge. The potato squares are meant to hold their shape, and the finished chowder is a broth with distinct cubes in it, not a mash. Shake the pan if anything catches instead of stirring it.
- SaltspoonfulA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so a quarter of one is roughly a pinch of pepper. Season to taste at the end rather than trying to measure it.
- The onionThe instructions drain the fat but never say what becomes of the fried onion. Add it to the saucepan with the potatoes, alongside the crisped bacon, which the recipe does specifically call for there.
- Barely cover with water"Nearly cover with boiling water" is deliberate. Any more and the pint of milk will not have enough body to carry the soup, since there is only a tablespoon of flour doing the thickening.
- Heat the milk firstThe recipe assumes hot milk blended into the butter-flour paste. Cold milk into warm flour and butter will lump, and cold milk poured into hot potatoes can curdle.
- Cook the flour outAfter the milk goes in, keep it at a bare simmer for two or three minutes until the raw flour taste is gone. A hard boil with milk in the pot risks scorching the bottom.
- Worcestershire goes in off the heatTwo teaspoons is assertive in a soup this mild, and its aroma dulls with boiling. Stir it in at the last moment and taste before adding salt.
- YieldPerhaps four servings as a light supper, though the recipe gives no yield. The recipe finishes with hot toasted crackers served with the chowder rather than crumbled into it.