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New England Chowder
4 tablespoons salt pork fat 4 tablespoons butter 2 tablespoons flour 2 cups boiling water salt, pepper, and cayenne 10 buttered crackers 3 cups potato dice Cook onion in salt pork fat until yellow; add clams or fish free from bone; simmer twenty minutes. Parboil potatoes, drain, and add to fish with boiling water. Cook until potatoes are tender.
Melt butter; add flour, tomatoes and seasonings. Combine mixtures, and pour over buttered crackers which have been previously soaked in cold milk. 2 cups lobster meat + cup onion 1/4 cup salt pork fat 2 tablespoons butter
A cracker-thickened chowder of the older Boston type, in which the crackers rather than a heavy cream base give the body. A few of the quantities in the printed text do not line up with the method, so read the whole thing before starting.
- The shellfish quantity is missingThe method calls for clams or fish, but no amount is given in the ingredients as printed. For 3 cups of potato dice, figure roughly a quart of shucked clams with their liquor, or 1 1/2 to 2 lb of skinned haddock or cod fillet.
- Tomatoes appear only in the methodThey are stirred into the butter-and-flour roux but never quantified. A cup of cooked or canned tomatoes, drained, is in keeping with the style.
- Buttered crackersThese are plain unsalted common crackers or pilot biscuit, split and spread with butter, not saltines. Unsalted top saltines will stand in, but use more of them and shorten the soak, as they collapse quickly.
- Soaking the crackersThey go into the tureen or bowl in cold milk and the hot chowder is poured over them. Allow about 1 1/2 to 2 cups of milk, enough to wet them through without leaving a pool, and let the assembled chowder stand five to ten minutes before serving so the crackers swell and thicken it.
- Twenty minutes on the clamsThat is far too long by modern practice. Shucked clams need two or three minutes and turn rubbery beyond that; add them near the end and give the long simmer to the pork, onion and potato instead. Firm white fish wants eight to ten minutes at most, in large pieces so it does not shred.
- Parboiling the potatoesThe first water is drained off and discarded, plausibly to keep the chowder from tasting starchy. Skip it if you want a thicker chowder, and simply cook the dice in the broth until tender, about fifteen minutes.
- Salt pork fatRender diced salt pork slowly to get the 4 tablespoons of fat called for, and keep the browned scraps to scatter over the finished bowls. If you have none, bacon fat works, though it brings a smoke flavour the original did not have.
- YieldProbably enough for about six as a first course or four as a main dish, though the recipe gives no yield. Season at the end: salt pork and crackers both carry salt, and the cayenne should register only as warmth.
Chowder in New England was a ship's and shore's dish long before it was a restaurant one, built from what kept well at sea / salted pork, hard biscuit and whatever came out of the water. The name is generally traced to the French chaudière, the cauldron in which such a mess would be cooked, though this remains a traditional derivation rather than a settled one. The layered construction here / fat, onion, fish, potato, crackers / preserves that older method, where the crackers are structural rather than a garnish. The tomato is the surprise: tomato in chowder is usually treated as a New York or Rhode Island habit and was disowned by Maine and Massachusetts cooks, yet it turns up quietly in some turn-of-the-century Boston books like this one. Lowney's Cook Book was issued by a Boston chocolate manufacturer, and chowder sits in its soup chapter among the dishes a New England household cook was expected to produce.