Clam Chowder
Two dozen clams, three-quarters pound of lean pork, three onions of medium size, one pint of tomatoes, celery to flavor, potatoes to thicken (about one quart), one pint of milk. Chop pork and brown in an iron kettle very brown.
Then put in the water and other ingredients except milk. Cook one hour, then put in the milk just before removing from the fire. - Mrs S. F. Snow.
A terse contributor's recipe that assumes you already know how chowder goes. Two things are missing outright: the amount of water, and any mention of when the clams go in.
- The clams go in lastBoiling shucked clams for an hour turns them to erasers. Steam the two dozen open in a little water, strain and reserve that liquor, chop the meats, and stir them in during the final two or three minutes. The hour of cooking is for the pork, onion, potato and tomato.
- The missing waterNo quantity is given. Reserved clam liquor plus water or stock to cover the vegetables by an inch is right, roughly 1 to 1.5 quarts for this volume; the finished chowder should be thick from the potato, not soupy.
- "Lean pork"In a chowder of this period this most likely means lean salt pork, diced small and rendered until the bits are crisp and the fat golden brown. Unsalted fresh pork will leave the pot bland. If using salt pork, hold off on additional salt until the end.
- Two dozen clamsMost likely hard-shell quahogs or large cherrystones, the usual chowder clam. That is roughly a pound of meat. About 13 oz of canned chopped clams with their juice is a reasonable stand-in.
- Iron kettle and tomatoesAn hour of simmering acidic tomato in bare cast iron will pick up a metallic taste and dull the color. Brown the pork in iron if you like, then move to enameled cast iron or a heavy stainless pot.
- Milk and tomatoAdding cold milk to a hot acidic pot curdles it. Warm the pint of milk first, take the pot off the heat, and stir it in — the recipe's "just before removing from the fire" is doing important work here.
- Potatoes to thickenAbout a quart, presumably measured diced, which is roughly 1.5 lb. Use a starchy potato and cut it small so some of it breaks down and does the thickening; waxy potatoes will stay in neat cubes and leave the broth thin.
- Celery to flavorTwo or three ribs chopped, added with the onions. Celery seed was also available to cooks of the period; a scant teaspoon does much the same job.
- YieldServes six to eight as a main course with crackers or pilot bread.
This is a chowder caught between two camps: tomatoes and no thickening flour point toward the Rhode Island and New York style later nicknamed Manhattan clam chowder, while the pint of milk at the end belongs to the New England tradition that regarded tomatoes in a chowder as close to sacrilege. Regional recipes were not yet as hardened as they became in the twentieth century, and household cookbooks assembled from readers' contributions -- this one signed by Mrs. S. F. Snow -- preserve exactly this kind of local hybrid. The word chowder is generally traced to the French chaudière, the cauldron in which fishermen's communal stews were cooked, and the form of the dish here is faithful to that origin: pork fat rendered first, everything else built on top of it in one pot.