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Fish Chowder (Take any large fish and cut)
Take any large fish, and cut in thin slices, lay some slices of tat bacon at the bottom of the pot and then a layer of fish, onions, cracker dust, red and black pepper, salt, and butter.
Then more layers, until you have used all the fish. Cover the whole with water and cook until well done.--Mrs. D.
A layered fish stew of the old New England pattern, written down in shorthand for cooks who already knew it. The instructions give no quantities at all, so the proportions below are a working starting point rather than a conversion.
- Scale itFor 4 to 6 servings use about 2 lb of firm white fish (cod, haddock, striped bass), 4 oz bacon or salt pork, 2 medium onions, and roughly 1 cup crushed crackers. "Any large fish" means a fish that yields thick, meaty slices; small bony fish will fall apart into the broth.
- "Tat bacon"A typographical slip for fat bacon — in a Virginia kitchen of the 1870s that meant streaky side meat or salt pork. The recipe only says to lay the slices in the bottom of the pot; rendering them slowly first is a modern refinement, and the water added at the end does most of the cooking.
- Cracker dustCrushed hard water crackers or ship's biscuit, used as the thickener where a modern recipe would use flour or potato. Unsalted saltines or oyster crackers, coarsely crushed, are the closest supermarket equivalent. Some of the layers will dissolve into the broth and some will stay as soft lumps, which is correct.
- The hinge: do not stirThe layers are the whole method. Once the water is in, let it come to a bare simmer and leave it alone — stirring breaks the fish into shreds and turns the chowder to paste. Lift portions out with a broad spoon.
- "Cook until well done"Twenty to twenty-five minutes at a gentle simmer is enough for 1/2-inch slices; the fish is done when it flakes at the thickest point. "Well done" in period usage often implied longer cooking than we would give fish now, and a full hour will leave you with cottony fish in cloudy broth.
- Water, or something better"Cover the whole with water" is literal, and the broth builds its own body from the bacon, onion and crackers. Fish stock, or a cup of milk added in the last five minutes, will give a rounder result, though the recipe as written calls for water alone.
- Red and black pepperRed pepper here is cayenne, not paprika or a fresh chile. A generous pinch is in period character; salt lightly at first, since bacon and crackers both carry salt.
Chowder is a Northern dish that traveled south, and its appearance in Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), a compilation of contributed recipes from Virginia households, shows how freely such things circulated by the 1870s. The name is often traced to the French chaudière, the cauldron in which fishermen's crews were said to cook their share of the catch, though this is the traditional popular explanation rather than settled fact, and other origins have been proposed; the layered construction — pork fat, fish, onion, biscuit, repeat — is one of the recognizable early forms of the dish in English-language cookbooks. Hard crackers rather than potatoes as the thickener mark this as the earlier style; the initialed attribution to "Mrs. D." is typical of the book, which credits hundreds of contributors by name or initial and preserves their telegraphic, quantity-free way of writing recipes down for people who had already watched them made.