Home › Soups › Rhode Island Chowder
Rhode Island Chowder
Put into a spider one-third of a cup of fine cubes of fat salt pork, one large onion finely sliced and half a cup of water. Cook till reduced to a small quantity of rich liquor. To four cups of potato cubes which have been parboiled, add this liquor, the strained juice from one quart of clams, the hard portions of the clams finely chopped, and one pint of boiling water. Cook till the potatoes are nearly done, then add one cup of stewed, strained tomato, a quarter of a teaspoon of baking soda and the soft part of the clams. Allow this to simmer gently.
Before pouring the chowder into the tureen, add two cups of scalding milk, two tablespoons of butter, one teaspoon of salt, a dash of pepper and cayenne and a dozen small crackers.
A hybrid chowder — pork and potato in the New England manner, with tomato and milk both in the pot. The baking soda is not a leavener here; it is what keeps the two from fighting.
- SpiderA spider is a cast-iron frying pan, originally with legs for hearth cooking. Any heavy skillet or the bottom of the soup pot works; you will be transferring everything to one pot anyway.
- The soda is the hingeA quarter teaspoon of baking soda neutralizes enough acid in the tomato to stop the milk curdling when it hits the hot pot. Add it with the tomato as directed, not with the milk, and do not increase it — excess soda gives a soapy, flat taste and dulls the color.
- A quart of clamsThis means shucked clams with their liquor; how many quahogs that takes depends entirely on their size. Canned chopped clams plus bottled juice will substitute.
- Hard and soft portionsQuahog meat divides into the tough adductor muscle and neck, which need chopping and time, and the soft belly, which needs almost none. The recipe's split timing is deliberate: chopped hard parts go in with the potatoes, bellies go in at the end. Reversed, the bellies turn to rubber.
- Strain the liquorClam liquor carries sand. Pour it through a coffee filter or several layers of cheesecloth rather than a plain sieve, or the whole chowder grits.
- Scalding milkHeat the milk separately to just below a simmer, around 180F, before it goes in. Cold milk into hot acidic broth is the other way this curdles. Once the milk is in, do not let the chowder boil.
- SaltOne teaspoon assumes the salt pork and the clam liquor are doing much of the seasoning. Taste after the milk goes in and salt then.
- The crackersThese are New England common crackers or pilot biscuits — dry, hard, barely salted rounds meant to soften in the broth without dissolving. Oyster crackers are the nearest supermarket equivalent; saltines go to paste.
- YieldAbout three quarts, serving six as a main course. It improves after a few hours but should be reheated gently, well below a boil.
Rhode Island's chowder tradition sits awkwardly between the two camps everyone else argues about: the state is best known for a clear, brothy quahog chowder with no milk and no tomato at all, but a tomato-tinted version has long circulated around Narragansett Bay, and this recipe is a third thing again — tomato and milk together, held apart by a pinch of soda. Soda was often recommended in turn-of-the-century American cookbooks where an acid met dairy, and its appearance here may owe more to the period's chemistry-minded domestic science movement than to any Rhode Island kitchen. The quahog (hard-shell clam, Mercenaria mercenaria) is the state shellfish and the natural chowder clam: too tough to eat raw once it reaches full size, but with a deep, saline flavor that stands up to pork fat and potato.