Home › Soups › Corn and Tomato Chowder
Corn and Tomato Chowder
Open I can of corn and turn into a saucepan ; add 1 pint of water, salt and pepper to taste, and simmer for half an hour. Slice sufficient raw potatoes to measure 1 pint; scald with boiling water and drain. Put 1/4 of a pound of fat salt pork through the chopper; place into a fryingpan with 2 tablespoonfuls of finely chopped onion until the fat is tried out and slightly colored.
Strain into a kettle; add the corn and drained potatoes and simmer gently for ten minutes.
Add I can of tomatoes and more seasoning, and continue the cooking until the potatoes are done.
In the meantime have ready 1 pint of milk, thickened with 2 tablespoonfuls of flour. Take from the fire; add about 1 cupful of the chowder, then turn all into the kettle and serve at once, passing crisped crackers with it.
A thrifty New England-style chowder that leans on canned corn and tomatoes; the only real technical hazard is the milk meeting the tomato.
- The hinge: temper, don't boilOnce the thickened milk goes in, keep the pot below a simmer. Acid from the tomatoes will curdle milk that boils, and flour-thickened milk scorches on the bottom of a kettle quickly. The instruction to add a cupful of hot chowder to the milk first is the whole point — do not skip it.
- Can sizesCanned corn and tomatoes were not sold to a single standard in this period; the common No. 2 can held roughly 20 oz, though smaller and larger packs existed. Modern 14-15 oz cans are a workable substitute, one of each as the recipe specifies; use whole tomatoes broken up by hand or diced, with their juice.
- Fat salt pork and "tried out"Salt pork means the cured, unsmoked side pork sold in a block, not bacon. "Tried out" is rendered: cook the minced pork and onion over medium heat until the fat runs clear and the bits are pale gold, then strain the fat into the kettle. Bacon works if salt pork is unavailable, but it brings smoke the original does not have.
- Scalding the potatoesPouring boiling water over the raw slices and draining them was a common preliminary; it washes off surface starch and takes the raw edge off, which likely helps keep the chowder from going gluey. The recipe gives no thickness; slice them evenly. A pint of slices is roughly 10-12 oz, one or two medium potatoes.
- The thickened milkWhisk the 2 tablespoons flour into the cold pint of milk until smooth before heating, or make a paste with a few spoonfuls first. Whole milk gives the texture the recipe assumes; skim milk will taste thin against the salt pork.
- TimingHalf an hour of simmering for canned corn is longer than needed — it is already cooked — but it does build a sweet corn broth, so it is not wasted. The real timing cue is the potatoes: check at 12-15 minutes after the tomatoes go in and stop when a slice yields to a knife.
- Yield and the crackersAbout 2 quarts, serving four to six. "Crisped crackers" means plain soda crackers warmed until dry and hot; the recipe specifies no oven or temperature.
Chowder in nineteenth-century American cookery meant a layered pot built on rendered salt pork, potatoes and milk, most often with fish or clams; corn chowder is the inland, cash-poor version of the same formula, and tomato was the cheap canned addition that stretched it further. That combination was contentious — the argument over whether tomato belongs in a chowder at all is old enough to have produced the often-repeated story of a Maine legislative bill of 1939 proposing to outlaw it in clam chowder, an anecdote more often retold than documented — and this recipe sidesteps the quarrel by using both tomato and milk. Three cans and a quarter pound of salt pork feed a family.