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Cat-Fish Chowder or Hog-Fish
Take two cat-fish, skin, and boil till thoroughly done; pick very fine and add: 2 good sized onions. 1/4 pound butter. 1 tablespoonful salt. 1 tablespoonful pepper. 2 tablespoonfuls Worcestershire sauce.
Add a little celery or celery-seed, a little thyme, a little parsley. Pour over all about one quart of boiling water and cook fast bout half an hour.--Miss. F. N.
A stripped-down river chowder with no milk, no salt pork and no potatoes — just fish, onion, butter and a hard, fast boil. The seasoning quantities are the part that needs the most judgment.
- Fish quantity"Two cat-fish" is the vaguest thing here; farmed channel catfish fillets at about 1.5 to 2 lb total give roughly the right ratio of picked meat to the quart of water. Larger whole fish would yield considerably more.
- Hog-fishThe alternate title reflects a regional common name rather than a single species. Any firm, mild white fish works; if you buy true hogfish (Lachnolaimus maximus), check current Gulf and Atlantic size and season limits, as it is a managed species.
- PepperA full tablespoon of black pepper in a quart of liquid is aggressive by modern palates. Start with a teaspoon or two and correct at the end; the same goes for the tablespoon of salt, which assumes unsalted broth and unsalted butter.
- OnionsThe recipe does not say how to cut them; however they go in, they go in raw, softening only in the half-hour boil. Sweating them in the quarter-pound of butter first gives a rounder result without changing anything else.
- Celery seedIf you use seed rather than stalks, a scant half teaspoon is plenty — it is far more concentrated than the fresh vegetable the recipe treats as interchangeable.
- "Cook fast"This means a genuine rolling boil, not a simmer, which is what reduces and thickens a chowder with no flour or crackers in it. The fish is already fully cooked and picked, so it cannot overcook in the usual sense, though it will break down further into the broth.
- ConsistencyExpect something closer to a thick fish soup than a New England chowder. Hard crackers were a common accompaniment to chowders of the period, though this recipe makes no mention of them.
- YieldRoughly 5 to 6 cups depending on how much reduces in the fast boil, serving four as a main course.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by Virginia housewives, is full of these initialed submissions — "Miss. F. N." is typical of a book built from the recipe files of named and half-named neighbors. Catfish chowder belongs to the freshwater tradition of the James, the Rappahannock and the Ohio valley rather than the salt-water, milk-and-salt-pork chowders of New England; the word chowder is generally traced to the French chaudière, the cauldron in which fishermen's communal stews were cooked. The Worcestershire sauce is the giveaway that this is a later nineteenth-century recipe: Lea & Perrins had been widely exported to the United States since the 1840s, and by the 1870s Southern cookbooks reached for it the way an earlier generation reached for anchovy or mushroom catsup.