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Corn Chowder
1 quart of grated corn, 4 good sized potatoes, 2 medium sized onions, 1/2 pound of bacon or ham, I large tablespoonful of butter, 3 tablespoonfuls of flour, 1 pint of milk, 6 water crackers, Yolk of one egg, 1/2 pint of boiling water.
Pare and cut the potatoes and onions into dice. Cut the bacon or ham into small pieces, put it into a frying pan with the onions and fry until a nice brown. Put a layer of potatoes in the bottom of a saucepan, then a sprinkling of bacon or ham and onion, then a layer of corn, then a sprinkling of salt and pepper, then a layer of potatoes and so on, until all is in, having the last layer corn. Now add the water and place over a very moderate fire and simmer for twenty minutes. Then add the milk. Rub the butter and flour together and stir into the boiling chowder. Add the crackers, broken; stir; and cook five minutes longer. Taste to see if properly seasoned, take it from the fire, add the beaten yolk of the egg and serve. 6 cucumbers,
A straightforward layered chowder that needs only a few translations and one point of technique to work on a modern stove.
- The egg yolkTake the pan off the heat before the yolk goes in, and temper it: whisk a ladle of the hot chowder into the beaten yolk, then stir that back into the pot. Added straight to boiling liquid it will scramble into threads and the thickening is lost.
- A quart of grated cornThat is 4 cups of kernels and pulp, from roughly 6 to 10 ears depending on size, scraped with the back of a knife so the milky pulp comes too. Frozen corn works but gives no pulp; pulsing some of it in a food processor helps compensate.
- Water crackersA hard, barely salted ship's-biscuit type cracker; the New England common cracker is its nearest surviving relative. Oyster crackers or plain saltines are the usual stand-in; six crackers gives roughly a cup of broken pieces, and if they are salted they will change your seasoning.
- "A very moderate fire"Low heat, a bare simmer. Twenty minutes will cook potatoes cut in small dice; the recipe does not say what size, so keep them small, and allow longer if they are chunkier or they may still be firm when the milk goes in.
- Butter and flour rubbed togetherThis is beurre manié, not a cooked roux. Work the tablespoon of butter into the 3 tablespoons of flour to a paste and drop it into the simmering chowder in pieces, stirring, so it disperses without lumping.
- Bacon or hamHalf a pound of nineteenth-century salt-cured bacon was often saltier and fattier than modern slab bacon. Salt the layers lightly and correct at the end, as the recipe itself directs.
- CurdlingOnce the milk is in, keep the pot below a hard boil. Corn, salty bacon and a full pint of milk in a thin pot can break if it is allowed to gallop.
- YieldServes six as a first course, four as a supper dish with bread.
- The stray lineThe "6 cucumbers" at the end belongs to the next recipe in the book, not to this one.
Chowder in nineteenth-century American cookbooks is often a dish built in layers in a single pot, and many of the older recipes begin with salt pork or bacon, onion and potatoes, with crackers stirred in to thicken. Fish chowder appears earliest in the New England record; corn chowder reads as an inland, high-summer version, made when fresh corn was briefly abundant and cheap. The name is generally traced to the French chaudi erby way of the Atlantic fishing coasts, though the link is traditional rather than documented. Its place among vegetable recipes is a reminder that "vegetable" cookery of the period did not mean meatless: half a pound of bacon and a pint of milk were simply how you made corn into dinner. The finishing egg yolk is the kind of French-style liaison found in more genteel household cookery.