Corn Chowder
1 cup salt pork cut in cubes 1 cup potatoes ½ cup onion salt and cayenne 3 cups water 2 cups milk 1 tablespoon butter 1 tablespoon flour ½ cup cracker crumbs Cook salt pork in frying pan five minutes; add onion and cook until yellow. Parboil potatoes five minutes; add to onion with corn and water; cook twenty minutes. Thicken milk with butter and flour cooked together.
Combine mixtures; add cracker crumbs and seasonings. and serve.
Succotash may be substituted for corn.
A compact New England chowder that assumes a cook who already knows the form. The ingredient list is incomplete and the method is telegraphic, so read both together before starting.
- The missing cornThe list gives no quantity of corn although the method calls for it. Something like two cups — the kernels from three or four ears, or a 15-oz can, drained — suits the volume of liquid and potato here.
- Salt porkA cup of cubed salt pork is a generous amount of fat and salt by current standards. Render it slowly rather than the flat five minutes given; you want the fat out and the cubes browned. Pour off all but two or three tablespoons before adding the onion, and hold back the salt until the end.
- Cut the potatoes smallThe recipe never says how. Half-inch dice will parboil in five minutes and finish tender in the twenty-minute simmer; larger pieces will still be hard.
- The milk thickening"Thicken milk with butter and flour cooked together" is a roux: melt the butter, stir in the flour, cook a minute without colouring, then whisk in the warm milk. One tablespoon of each to two cups of milk gives a very light body, which is correct for chowder — it should not be a chowder-thick paste.
- Do not boil after the milk goes inThis is the hinge. Once the milk mixture joins the pork-and-potato base, hold it below a simmer. Salt pork, onion and a hard boil will curdle the milk, and the chowder will look broken even though it tastes fine.
- Cracker crumbsPeriod common crackers or pilot biscuit, crushed. Unsalted saltines or oyster crackers are the nearest thing. They are the thickener as much as the flour, so add them off the heat and let the pot stand a few minutes to swell.
- CayenneCalled for as seasoning, not as heat — a pinch, meant to lift the sweetness of the corn and milk. White pepper does the same job.
- YieldThe liquid alone is five cups before the pork, potato, onion, corn and crumbs go in, so expect roughly eight cups of finished chowder; six bowls, or more as a first course.
Chowder in New England began as a fisherman's dish built on salt pork, ship's biscuit and whatever came out of the water, and corn chowder is the inland, thrifty descendant of that pattern — the same pork, potato, milk and cracker frame with corn standing in for fish. The cracker crumbs here are the surviving trace of the older method, in which whole hard biscuits were layered into the pot to soften and thicken it. This version comes from Lowney's Cook Book, published by the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer; it surrounds its promotional chocolate recipes with a full run of ordinary household cookery, which is why a corn chowder sits in a book best known for confectionery. The closing line — that succotash may be substituted for corn — is characteristic of the era's frugality, succotash being the standing corn-and-bean dish that would already be in the house.