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Lobster Chowder
4 cups milk salt, cayenne, blade of mace 1 cup hot cream 2 tablespoons flour Cook onion in salt pork fat; melt butter; add flour, milk and seasonings, and cook in double boiler with lobster cut in cubes twenty minutes; add strained salt pork fat, hot cream, and serve.
A New England-style chowder printed in the compressed telegraphic style Lowney's used for its soup chapter, where the ingredient column and the method were set side by side and have run together here. Read it as a thin cream soup rather than a potato chowder, and expect to supply several quantities yourself.
- The missing amountsThe printed list gives only milk, cream, flour and seasoning. For 4 cups of milk plan on the meat of one 1½–2 lb boiled lobster, a small onion, about 2 tablespoons butter, and a thin slice of salt pork. Those figures are reconstruction, not the book's.
- Don't cook the lobster twenty minutesThe book does direct twenty minutes in the double boiler with the lobster in it, but lobster held that long in hot milk turns fibrous and squeaky. Better to cook the sauce for that time, then fold in the cut lobster for the last three or four minutes, just to heat through.
- Blade of maceThe dried outer covering of the nutmeg, sold in flat orange-brown shards. One blade in 4 cups of milk is enough; fish it out before serving. About ⅛ teaspoon of ground mace substitutes, though it clouds the soup.
- Salt pork fatRender a thin slice of salt pork slowly, cook the onion in the fat, then strain. The strained fat is added at the very end as a finish, which is where the chowder character comes from. Blanched bacon works, but it brings smoke the original did not have.
- Double boilerNot fussiness. A flour-thickened milk soup scorches easily over direct heat, and the double boiler was a fixture of the cooking-school kitchens this book draws on. A heavy saucepan over low heat with steady stirring does the same job in less time.
- Butter and flourMelt the butter, stir in the flour and let it cook a minute before the milk goes in, or the soup tastes of raw paste. Add the milk gradually and off the boil to keep it smooth.
- Hot creamThe cup of cream is warmed and added at the end so it does not drop the temperature or break. The book does not specify a grade; period 'cream' was often thinner than modern heavy cream.
- YieldRoughly five to six cups of finished soup, serving four as a first course.
Lowney's Cook Book (1907) was written by Maria Willett Howard for the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston, a chocolate manufacturer, and, as house-brand cookbooks of the period often did, it set its chocolate chapters within a full general cookery course drawn from the Boston cooking-school tradition. That tradition shows here: milk thickened with a butter-and-flour roux, held in a double boiler, finished with hot cream and a blade of mace. Lobster chowder belonged to a family of New England shellfish chowders that were once far more common than the tomato-and-potato versions later associated with the word; chowder itself is generally traced to the French chaudière, the cauldron in which fishermen's stews were cooked.