Corn Chowder
Chop a small piece of salt pork and in it fry one sliced onion for five minutes.
Strain the browned butter into a saucepan. Parboil four cups of potatoes cut in cubes in boiling water. Drain and put them in the saucepan. Cover with one pint of boiling water, cook till the potatoes are softened, then add one can of chopped corn, one quart of scalded milk, heat to the boiling point. Season with pepper and salt, add three tablespoons of butter and eight crackers which have been soaked in cold milk. A cream corn soup made from chopped corn may be cooked after the directions given for celery soup.
A plain New England-style chowder, thickened with soaked crackers rather than flour. Two lines in the original need translating before you start.
- "The browned butter"There is no butter in the pan at that stage; this means the rendered fat from the salt pork. Strain it into the saucepan and, unless you want them, leave the pork scraps and onion behind, though they can equally be kept for texture and flavour.
- Salt pork"A small piece" is perhaps 2 oz, diced fine, but the original gives no weight. If you cannot find salt pork, thick-cut unsmoked bacon renders similarly, though it brings a smoky note the original did not have. Salt the finished soup at the end, after tasting.
- Don't let it boil once the milk is in"Heat to the boiling point" is the outer limit. Held at a boil, salted milk is liable to curdle. Bring it just to a shiver and hold it there.
- One can of chopped cornA canned corn of the period was likely somewhat larger than a modern can but the size is not given; about two cups of drained kernels, or the equivalent cut from three or four ears, will answer. "Chopped corn" here appears to mean kernels cut from the cob rather than creamed.
- Scalded milkScalding was a safety and keeping measure for raw milk and is unnecessary with pasteurized milk. Heat the quart anyway so it does not chill the pot, and add it warm.
- Eight crackersThese are common crackers or hard water crackers — dense, unsalted rounds, not modern saltines. Saltines will work but dissolve almost completely and add salt; soak them in cold milk only until softened, a minute or two, or the chowder turns to paste.
- PotatoesFour cups cubed is roughly 1.5 lb. Parboiling first, then finishing in a pint of water, keeps the starch out of the milk; a floury variety such as russet will still break down and thicken the soup slightly, which is traditional here.
- YieldServes six to eight as a first course, four as a supper dish. It improves after a rest off the heat, and reheats best below a simmer.
Chowder in nineteenth-century American cookbooks is a layered pork-and-potato construction — fat, aromatics, starch, milk, and crackers to bind — and the corn version is the inland cousin of the clam and fish chowders of the New England coast, made from a store cupboard rather than a shoreline. The crackers are often said to be the oldest element: before roux-thickened soups became standard in American home cooking, hard ship's biscuit or common crackers were the usual thickener, crumbled in or laid in the bottom of the bowl. That a can of corn appears without comment suggests a recipe belonging to the era of industrial canning, when tinned sweet corn was, by most accounts, cheap and widely available. The closing sentence, pointing the reader to the celery soup entry for a cream version, is typical of how these books were organised — one technique, cross-referenced, rather than repeated for each vegetable.