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Cat-Fish Chowder
To be made of New River cat-fish.
Wash the fish in warm water, put it on in just water enough to cover it, boil until tender or until the bones will slip out; take out the largest bones, chop up the fish, put it in a stewpan with a pint of water, a large lump of butter. 1 cup of cream, pepper and not much salt. 1 onion, one teaspoonful mustard, one-half teacupful walnut catsup. Stew until quite thick, garnish with sliced lemon and serve hot.--Mrs. P. W.
A thin, quick fish stew rather than the potato-and-salt-pork chowder the name suggests. The recipe assumes a whole fish poached on the bone, so most of the work is picking it clean.
- The fishThe New River rises in North Carolina and runs through southwest Virginia and West Virginia, so this most likely means wild river fish. Farmed channel catfish fillets, about 1 1/2 lb, can be used instead and skip the boning entirely; poach them 6-8 minutes rather than the long boil a whole fish needs.
- Bones are the hingeThe instruction to boil "until the bones will slip out" is the point of the first cooking, and the fish is worth picking over by hand after chopping, since the recipe asks only for the removal of "the largest bones."
- Walnut catsupA dark, salty condiment of green walnuts, vinegar, anchovy and spice, once a common commercial condiment and now hard to find outside specialist British suppliers. Mushroom ketchup is the closest surviving cousin; Worcestershire sauce is the practical stand-in, but use about half the volume, as it is sharper and saltier.
- Old measuresA teacupful was generally reckoned smaller than a modern cup, somewhere around 1/2 to 3/4 cup, so the half teacupful of catsup works out at roughly 4 to 6 tablespoons; the book does not define the measure. A "large lump of butter" is likewise undefined -- 2 to 3 tablespoons is a reasonable reading. The pint of fresh water is on top of whatever clings to the fish.
- Mustard and onionThe teaspoonful of mustard is most likely dry mustard powder rather than prepared paste, though the recipe does not say. Nor does it say how to cut the onion, and there is no separate sweating step, so chop it small or it will stay crunchy.
- Salt"Not much salt" is deliberate. Walnut catsup was heavily salted, and with Worcestershire in its place the same warning applies: season at the end, after the stew has reduced.
- Reducing it"Stew until quite thick" means simmering until the liquid coats the fish, perhaps 15-20 minutes depending on the pan. Keep it at a bare simmer once the cream is in so it does not break.
- YieldNo yield is stated; the quantities suggest three or four servings.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1877), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by Virginia housewives, is full of dishes signed only with initials, as this one is. Its "chowder" belongs to an older and looser use of the word than the milk-and-potato formula standardized in New England: here it simply means fish stewed thick, closer to a made dish than a soup. Walnut catsup places the recipe firmly in the nineteenth-century larder, when "catsup" meant any thin, keeping sauce built on vinegar and a savory base such as walnuts, mushrooms or oysters, and tomato was only one option among many.