Potato Chowder
3 cups potatoes cut into dice ½ cup salt pork cut into dice 4 cup onion 2 tablespoons butter 2 tablespoons flour 3 cups milk 1 cup water 1 tablespoon parsley 1 teaspoon salt cayenne and celery salt Cook salt pork in frying pan ten minutes; add onion, cook ten minutes. Put a layer of parboiled potatoes in kettle, cover with onions and salt pork, and so continue until all potatoes and onions are used.
Cover with water and simmer until potatoes are tender. Melt butter; add flour, milk and seasonings. Cook five minutes. Combine mixtures.
If potatoes are very old, it is better to parboil them before putting them with the onion. 1 can corn
A straightforward salt pork and milk chowder, though the ingredient list has a few typographical casualties and the final line is an orphaned variation rather than an instruction.
- The "4 cup onion"Most likely a broken fraction, probably ¼ cup chopped onion (a portion of a small onion), though ¾ is possible. A full four cups would overwhelm three cups of potato.
- That last line"1 can corn" sits outside the method with no direction attached. Treat it as the corn-chowder variation implied by the ingredient list: drain a 15-oz can and add it when you combine the two mixtures, heating just through.
- Salt porkUnsmoked cured pork belly or fatback, sold in slabs at some butchers. Thick-cut bacon substitutes acceptably, though it brings smoke the original did not have. Render it over medium heat rather than high, so the dice give up fat and colour without scorching.
- ParboilingThe note about old potatoes is the practical hinge. Waxy or new potatoes go straight in; older starchy ones benefit from a few minutes in boiling water first, which draws off some surface starch and any strong flavour the potato has picked up in storage.
- The layeringBuilding alternating layers of potato, onion and pork is the standard chowder construction of the period. Add water barely to cover and simmer without agitating, until the potatoes are tender.
- Milk and curdlingThe butter-flour-milk mixture is a thin béchamel; cooking it five minutes is enough to lose the raw flour taste. Combine off high heat and hold the finished chowder below a simmer, since salt pork and long boiling both encourage milk to break.
- SeasoningCayenne and celery salt are given without amounts. A pinch of cayenne and ¼ teaspoon celery salt suit this quantity; add the teaspoon of plain salt only after tasting, as the pork contributes a good deal.
- YieldAbout two quarts, serving four generously as a main course or six as a first course. Parsley goes in at the end, not with the seasonings, or it turns drab.
Chowder in American cookbooks of this period meant a specific construction rather than any thick soup: salt pork rendered for fat, onion softened in it, and the main ingredient layered with both before liquid was added -- a method inherited from the fish chowders of coastal New England (the name is generally traced to chaudière, the cauldron itself). Potato chowder is the frugal inland cousin, standing in when there was no clam or haddock to be had, and it belongs to the same household logic as the corn chowder gestured at in the stray final line. Its presence in Lowney's Cook Book is worth noting: the book was published by the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston, a chocolate manufacturer, and although the volume exists largely to sell cocoa, it was compiled as a genuine general cookbook, soups and roasts and all.