Fish Chowder
4 lbs. fish 7 large potatoes cut in 1/8 inch slices 1 onion minced 1/4 lb. salt pork 1 qt. scalded milk 1 tablespoon butter 8 butter crackers 1 tablespoon salt 1/4 teaspoon pepper Cod, bass or haddock may be used. Remove the skin, but reserve the head and tail, which, with the backbone, should be placed in a kettle, 2 cups of cold water added, and bring slowly to boiling point; cook twenty minutes. Cut flesh in two inch pieces and set aside. Parboil potatoes ten minutes in enough boiling water to cover, and drain. Cut pork in dice and fry in an omelet pan with onion and when a light brown put onion and fat in a kettle; add potatoes, seasonings, liquor drained from the bones, and 2 cups boiling water; add the pieces of fish. Cover and simmer fifteen minutes; add butter and hot milk. Split crackers, put in tureen, and pour the hot chowder over them. A cup of fine cracker crumbs may be added if a thicker broth is desired, or 2 eggs may be beaten light and mixed with the hot milk before it is added to the chowder.
A classic New England layered chowder, written when a whole fish came home head, tail and backbone intact. Almost everything here still works; the adjustments are mostly about buying fish differently and easing back on the salt.
- Buy the fish whole if you canThe 4 lb is whole-fish weight, which yields roughly 2 lb of flesh once head, tail, skin and frame are removed. If you can only get fillets, buy about 2 lb and ask the counter for a pound or so of cod or haddock frames to make the 20-minute stock, which is what gives the broth its body.
- Salt pork and the tablespoon of saltBetween the salt pork and a full tablespoon of added salt, the pot can easily end up over-salted. Render the pork first, taste the broth after the potatoes have simmered, and salt from there.
- Butter crackersA thick, dry cracker of the common-cracker or pilot-biscuit type, which swells without dissolving. Oyster crackers or saltines are the usual substitute, but they soften almost immediately, so add them at the table rather than lining the tureen.
- Omelet panSimply a shallow skillet. Render the diced pork slowly over medium heat until the fat runs and the dice are light brown, then soften the onion in that fat.
- Fifteen minutes is long for the fishTwo-inch pieces of cod or haddock are done in six to eight minutes of gentle simmering; fifteen leaves them dry and stringy. Slip the fish in only once the potatoes are nearly tender, and stop as soon as it flakes.
- Scalded milk, and never boil afterScalding means heating to just below the boil, around 180F, with bubbles at the rim. Add it hot so the chowder is not shocked cold, and keep the pot below a simmer afterward or the milk may curdle.
- The egg enrichmentIf you use the two beaten eggs, whisk a ladle of the hot milk into them first, then stir the mixture back in off the heat. Added straight to the pot they scramble.
- YieldServes eight generously as a main course, and it is better on the second day; reheat gently without letting it boil.
Chowder belongs to the fishing coasts of New England and Atlantic Canada, and the name is generally traced to the French chaudière, the cauldron in which a shared catch was cooked. The structure here is the old one: pork fat for richness, potatoes for bulk, a stock made from the frame so nothing is wasted, milk added last, and hard crackers to thicken and stretch it. Crackers were doing the work flour or roux does in later versions, which is why the recipe offers cracker crumbs rather than a thickened base. Its appearance in a flour miller's promotional cookbook is a reminder that these volumes aimed to be complete household references, not just showcases for the sponsor's product, and a soup chapter without a fish chowder would have looked incomplete to any American cook of the period.