Fish Chowder
1 haddock weighing five pounds 4 cups potato dice 1/2 cup onion dice ½ cup salt pork dice salt, pepper, cayenne 4 cups hot water 2 tablespoons butter 4 tablespoons flour 4 cups milk 10 buttered crackers Remove head and skin and cut fish into fillets. Cover head, skin and bones with cold water; simmer twenty minutes; strain. Reserve liquor. Parboil potatoes ten minutes. Cook onions in salt pork until yellow. Arrange in layers, fish, potatoes, onions, and salt pork; cover with water in which bones were cooked, and simmer until potatoes are tender. Thicken milk with butter and flour cooked together, combine mixtures, add seasonings, and pour over buttered crackers which have been previously soaked in cold milk.
Caution. - Do not allow onion or salt pork to burn. 4 cups clams or 4 pounds haddock 4 tablespoons onion 4 cups tomatoes
A New England chowder built in layers, with the fish frame simmered into a quick stock before anything else happens. The proportions are generous: a five-pound haddock with four cups each of potato and milk feeds eight to ten as a main course.
- The missing fractionThe onion measure prints as "cup onion dice" with the fraction dropped. The quantity cannot be recovered from the text; anything from ½ to 1 cup works, and the variation line at the end calls for 4 tablespoons.
- Buy the whole fishThe recipe depends on the head, skin and bones for its stock. A fillet-only purchase leaves you with four cups of plain water. Ask for a whole haddock, gutted and scaled, with the frame kept; or buy fillets plus a pound of fish bones separately.
- Buttered crackersThese are common crackers or pilot biscuit, the hard split rounds sold in New England, not saltines. Split, butter, and soak briefly in cold milk so they soften without dissolving. Saltines will turn to paste; unsalted water biscuits are the closest widely available substitute.
- Keep it below a simmer once milk goes inThe hinge of the dish. After the thickened milk meets the fish broth, hold it at a bare quiver. A boil curdles the milk and shreds the haddock into threads.
- Layering is not decorativeFish, potato, onion and pork are stacked rather than stirred so the fish poaches in place instead of breaking up. Add liquid gently down the side of the pot and never stir; shake the pan if you must.
- Salt porkUnsmoked salt pork, rinsed of surface salt and diced small. Bacon substitutes but brings smoke the recipe does not intend. Render it slowly, then cook the onion in the fat until translucent and pale gold, no further; scorched pork turns the whole pot bitter, which is what the original's caution is about.
- Season at the endSalt pork and the fish stock both carry salt, so hold off until the chowder is assembled. Cayenne here is a few grains, not a teaspoon.
- The last line is a variant"4 cups clams or 4 pounds haddock, 4 tablespoons onion, 4 cups tomatoes" is printed without its own heading or method, apparently a tomato-based alternative. What exactly it substitutes for is not stated.
- Rest itChowder is better half an hour off the heat, or the next day reheated gently. The potato starch and the crackers need time to settle the body of the broth.
Chowder came into New England kitchens from the Atlantic fishery, and the name is generally traced to the French chaudière, the cauldron a shore crew cooked in, though the derivation is traditional rather than settled. The older form was strictly a layered pot of fish, salt pork, onion and hard biscuit moistened with water; milk and a butter-and-flour thickening are later refinements, and this version shows both stages at once, with the crackers still doing their ancestral job of soaking up broth at the bottom of the bowl. Haddock, cheap and abundant off the Massachusetts coast, was one of the fish a New England cook would reach for. That the book is a chocolate manufacturer's cookbook explains the company's name on the cover and not much else: the soup chapter is simply competent Boston cooking of the day.