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CHAPTER XXXVI: Wash
Wash clams with a small brush, and put in a kettle with cupful water. When the clams at the top have opened, take them out with a skimmer, and when cool enough to handle, take the clams from the shells; remove the thin skin; cut off all the black end (cut the "leather straps" into small pieces), leaving the soft part whole. Let the clam liquor set, and pour it off carefully. Use half water and half clam liquor.
Fry the pork and onion; add the potatoes, which have been soaked and scalded, and boiling water to cover.
When the potatoes are soft, add the clam liquor, seasoning, and clams; when warmed through, add the hot milk, and turn into the tureen over broken crackers.-MARY J. LINCOLN.
Old-Fashioned Bean Soup (New England recipe). 2 cupfuls white beans, 3 pints cold water, 4 ounces lean salt pork, 1/4 cupful chopped celery, carrot, 1 onion.
Soak beans for several hours in cold water; then drain and put them with the pork over the fire; wash and scald in boiling water; add to the beans as soon as they boil celery, carrot, and onion; cover and cook till the beans are tender; then strain the soup, season to taste with salt, and serve with small pieces of toasted bread. This soup may be served without being strained-some people prefer to have the beans whole in the soup. A little beef extract and cupful cream is always an improvement, but the soup is very nice without them.
Herb Soup. 1/4 cupful finely shredded spinach, ½ cupful shredded sorrel, 1 blanched and sliced leek, White heart leaves head lettuce, 4 potatoes, 3 teaspoonfuls salt, MRS. CURTIS'S COOKBOOK 4 tablespoonfuls butter, 1 tablespoonful chervil, 2 quarts boiling water, pint croutons.
Have the sorrel, spinach, and lettuce fresh, tender, and free from tough midribs. Wash and shred.
Cut the washed leek into thin slices.
Put in the stewpan with the butter and cook fifteen minutes, being careful not to brown. Now add the potatoes, salt, and boiling water. When the soup begins to boil, draw the stewpan back where the contents will cook gently for one hour. At the end of this time, crush the potatoes with a fork, add the chervil, and simmer five minutes longer. Turn into the soup tureen, add the croutons, and serve.
If preferred, the soup may be rubbed through a purée sieve, returned to the fire, and when boiling hot be poured on the yolks of 2 eggs which have been beaten with 2 tablespoonfuls milk.
This soup may be varied indefinitely.
Any number of green vegetables can be employed in making it, care being taken to use only a small quantity of those of pronounced flavor. MARIA PARLOA.
Three New England soups run together here, and the first one is missing its ingredient list — the page begins mid-recipe. Read it as a method for clam chowder rather than a complete formula.
- The chowder's missing quantitiesThe clam chowder opens partway through, so the amounts of salt pork, onion, potatoes and milk are absent. A workable ratio for a quart of shucked clams and their liquor is about 2 oz salt pork, one onion, 3 medium potatoes and a pint of milk, but that is reconstruction, not what the book says.
- Do not boil the clamsThe hinge of the chowder. Clams are steamed only until the top ones gape, then shucked, and returned to the pot at the very end "when warmed through." Anything past a minute or two in hot liquid turns them tough and rubbery.
- Letting the liquor setClam liquor carries sand. Standing it in a bowl and pouring off the clear part, leaving the grit behind, is the whole reason for the step — or strain it through a coffee filter or muslin.
- Leather straps and black endsThe "leather straps" are the tough necks and siphons; the black end holds the stomach and dark digestive matter. Cut the necks fine so they soften, discard the black, and keep the soft bellies whole. This describes large chowder clams (quahogs) or soft-shell steamers rather than the small littlenecks usually eaten whole today.
- Salt porkTwo of these recipes lean on it: the chowder and the bean soup, which specifies 4 ounces of lean salt pork; the herb soup uses butter instead. Salt pork varies in saltiness and fat, so blanch it briefly if the finished soup tastes oversalted, and hold back added salt until the end.
- "Soaked and scalded" potatoesThe book does not say why it calls for both steps; soaking cut potatoes in cold water draws off surface starch, which would keep the chowder from going gluey. Neither step is essential with today's waxy potatoes, and neither does harm.
- Sorrel and chervilSorrel is sharply acidic and rarely stocked; a handful of spinach with a squeeze of lemon stands in. Fresh chervil is a tablespoon of the chopped leaf, not dried — it loses everything when dried and should go in near the end, as written.
- Draw the stewpan backCooking on a coal range meant moving the pan to a cooler part of the top. On a gas or electric hob, reduce to the lowest simmer that keeps a lazy bubble.
- The egg-yolk finishThe purée version is poured boiling onto raw yolks beaten with milk. It thickens on the heat of the soup alone; if you want the yolks fully cooked, temper them in and return the pot to low heat, stirring, without letting it boil or the liaison curdles.
- YieldThe bean soup starts from 3 pints of water, the herb soup from 2 quarts, so each finishes at roughly a quart and a half to two quarts — four to six servings.
The two cooks named here are the establishment of American cookery instruction at the turn of the twentieth century: Mary J. Lincoln, first principal of the Boston Cooking School and author of the 1884 book that Fannie Farmer's later volume displaced, and Maria Parloa, who ran her own cooking school in Boston and wrote extensively for magazines and manufacturers. Their appearance in a general household compendium like this one shows how thoroughly the domestic-science movement had become the accepted authority — a household book could borrow a chowder method and simply sign a name to it. The clam chowder itself is the older layer: salt pork, onion, potato, clams, milk and broken crackers, in that order, is a New England pattern, though the potatoes and especially the milk appear to have entered the chowder later in the nineteenth century, with the crackers put in the tureen so the soup is poured over them rather than cooked with them. The bean and herb soups sit either side of it in class terms, the first a thrifty pot of beans and pork, the second a French-derived potage aux herbes of sorrel, chervil and lettuce leaves that assumes a kitchen garden.