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Fish Chowder (Fry a few slices of salt pork)
Fry a few slices of salt pork, cut the fish in small pieces, pare and slice the potatoes, add a little onion chopped fine.
Place all in layers in the kettle; season with salt and pepper. Stew over a slow fire thirty minutes.
A bare-bones layered chowder of the New England type, written for a cook who already knew what a chowder looked like. The two things it leaves out — liquid and quantities — are the two things you have to decide before you start.
- The missing liquidNo water or milk is specified, yet nothing here will "stew" thirty minutes without going dry and scorching. Add liquid barely to cover the layers: water or fish stock for the plain version, or water first and a cup or two of hot milk in the last five minutes. Milk added at the outset over direct heat will catch on the bottom.
- Quantities to work fromA workable ratio is 2 lb firm white fish, 3 or 4 medium potatoes, one onion, and 3 to 4 oz salt pork. That feeds four to six as a main course.
- Salt porkFatty cured pork belly, sold in slabs near the bacon. Unsmoked is correct; bacon will make the pot taste of smoke. Dice it, render it slowly, and use the fat as the cooking medium — the fried slices themselves usually go back into the layers or are scattered on top.
- The fishCod and haddock are the traditional choices, and any firm white fish will do. Thirty minutes is far too long for fish, so cut it in generous chunks rather than small pieces and expect it to break up into flakes; the potatoes are what actually need the half hour.
- "A slow fire"A bare simmer, not a boil. Hard boiling emulsifies the pork fat into the broth and shreds the fish to threads. Keep the surface just trembling and do not stir much; shaking or lifting the pot rather than stirring is the usual way to keep the potato slices whole.
- The layersThe recipe says only to place everything in layers and does not give an order. Pork fat and cracklings at the bottom, then potatoes, then onion, then fish, seasoning each layer, is one reasonable reading, leaving the potato in the fat and the fish above it rather than agitated in liquid.
- Timing checkThirty minutes assumes thinly sliced potatoes. Test a slice with a knife before serving; if the potato is still firm the chowder is not done, whatever the clock says.
- FinishingChowders of this period were commonly served with pilot biscuit or common crackers crumbled in or laid on top, which thicken the broth as they soften, though this recipe does not mention them. Butter and a good deal of black pepper at the table suit it.
Chowder is a New England fixture that traveled down the coast, and its appearance in a nineteenth-century American housekeeping book shows how freely regional dishes moved between compilers, who borrowed from each other and from Northern books constantly. The name is generally traced to the French chaudi he ffishermh... The name is generally traced to the French chaudi he a fishing crew cooked in, though the derivation is traditional rather than proven. What marks this as an older recipe is the layering: early chowders were built up in strata of pork, biscuit, fish and onion in a single pot rather than simmered as a soup, and the salt pork at the bottom did double duty as fat and as seasoning at a time when salt pork was a larder staple. The absence of milk is also period-correct; dairy-rich chowder became the default later, and plain water chowders remained common into the twentieth century.