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Potato Chowder
6 good-sized potatoes, I good-sized onion, 1 tablespoonful of butter, ¼ pound of bacon or ham, 1 tablespoonful of chopped pars- A pint of milk and a pint of ley, water, 1 tablespoonful of flour.
Pare and cut the potatoes in dice. Chop an onion fine. Cut the bacon or ham into small pieces and put it in a frying-pan. Add the onion, cook until a light brown. Put one layer of potatoes in the bottom of a saucepan, then sprinkle over the ham and onion, the parsley, salt and pepper. Then another layer of potatoes, then ham and onion and so continue until all the materials are used. Add the water, cover closely and cook on the back part of the stove twenty minutes. Then add the milk; rub the butter and flour together, then stir carefully into the boiling chowder. Cook one moment, taste to see if properly seasoned and serve very hot.
A layered potato and bacon chowder that cooks in about half an hour on the stovetop. The quantities are generous for four as a main course, six as a first course.
- The bacon quantityThe printed "14 pound" is a quarter pound of bacon or ham, roughly 4 oz. That is enough to season six potatoes without turning the pot greasy.
- LiquidA pint of water and a pint of milk, added in that order. The water cooks the potatoes; the milk goes in at the end so it does not catch or curdle over long heat.
- "The back part of the stove"On a wood or coal range this was the cooler zone. On a modern burner it means a bare simmer, lid on, for the full twenty minutes until the potato dice are tender.
- Don't skip the layeringBuilding potato, then ham and onion, then potato again distributes the fat and seasoning through the pot without stirring, which would break the dice into mush. Resist stirring until the flour and butter go in.
- The thickeningButter and flour rubbed together raw is a beurre manie. Drop it in small pieces into the barely boiling chowder and stir gently; it thickens in under a minute. Longer boiling after the milk is added risks the milk breaking.
- SaltSeason only after the ham or bacon has gone in and tasted for. Cured pork varies enormously in salt, and the recipe assumes you check at the end.
- Cut sizeThe recipe says only "in dice." Dice of roughly half an inch should be tender within the twenty minutes given; noticeably larger cubes may still be firm when the milk goes in.
Chowder in nineteenth-century American cookery could refer to a method as much as to a particular ingredient: salt pork or bacon rendered first, then alternating strata of the main material with onion and seasoning, liquid poured over and the whole left to steam under a lid. Fish and clam versions are the famous ones, but vegetable chowders of this kind also appear in the cookbooks of the period. The name is generally traced to the French chaudiere, the cauldron, by way of the fishing communities of the North Atlantic coast, though the connection is traditional rather than firmly documented.