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Salt Codfish Chowder
2 onions cut in small pieces 2 cups shredded codfish 1 cup cream 4 tablespoons butter 3 cups potato cut in cubes salt, pepper, cayenne 1 cup boiling water 8 crackers buttered 2 tablespoons flour Soak codfish in cold water one hour; drain. Parboil potatoes ten minutes. Cook onions in pork fat, add drained potatoes, fish, and one cup of boiling water; cook until potatoes are tender. Melt butter; add flour, milk, cream and seasonings. Combine mixtures, cook five minutes, and serve with crackers which have been previously soaked in milk. 2 cups clams 2 tablespoons onion bit of bay leaf 3 tablespoons butter 4 tablespoons flour
A workable New England chowder, but the printed ingredient list and the method do not quite match — read both before you shop. The last five lines belong to the clam chowder that follows and are not part of this dish.
- Stray ingredient listThe final run of quantities — 2 cups clams, 2 tablespoons onion, bay leaf, 3 tablespoons butter, 4 tablespoons flour — is the opening of the next recipe in the section, caught by the typesetter. Ignore it here.
- Missing from the listThe method calls for pork fat and for milk; neither appears among the quantities. Figure on about 2 ounces of diced salt pork tried out for the fat, and roughly 2 cups of milk with the cup of cream to make a soup rather than a paste.
- Salt codfishThis means hard salt-dried cod, not fresh fish and not the wet, lightly cured loins sold today. One hour in cold water is the minimum; heavily salted boneless cod in a wooden box wants several changes of water over 12 to 24 hours, and it is worth tasting a shred raw before committing it to the pot.
- Shredded, not cubedSalt cod is pulled apart along the grain into coarse threads after soaking. Doing this before the final soak lets the water reach more surface and speeds the desalting.
- Do not boil after the dairy goes inThe hinge of the dish. Once the cream and milk are combined with the fish and potatoes, hold it just under a simmer for the five minutes given. A hard boil curdles the milk against the salt in the fish and toughens the cod into rubber.
- Parboiling the potatoesTen minutes, then drained; the recipe does not say whether to salt the water. Cut the cubes no larger than half an inch so they finish in the single cup of boiling water without needing more liquid.
- The crackersCommon crackers — thick, dry, bland split rounds — were the standard chowder cracker. Saltines are too thin to soak in milk without dissolving; use split water biscuits or oyster crackers, and shorten the soak to a minute.
- Seasoning lastSalt only at the end. Even well-soaked cod carries enough salt that the dish frequently needs none, and the cayenne here is a pinch rather than a measured amount.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; the quantities suggest something in the region of four to six servings.
Lowney's Cook Book was compiled by Maria Willett Howard and issued in 1907 by the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer — one of the many house cookbooks that firms published to keep their name in American kitchens, which is why its chocolate chapters run so long. A salt cod chowder in the soup section is pure New England household economy: dried cod kept indefinitely without ice, cost little, and was on hand in coastal and inland pantries alike, so the chowder framework of pork fat, onion, potato and milk could be built around fish bought months earlier. The word chowder is generally traced to the French chaudière, the cauldron in which fishermen's communal stews were cooked, though the derivation is traditional rather than firmly documented. The milk-soaked cracker, layered in or served alongside, is the older form of the dish; by the twentieth century it was already receding in favour of a flour-thickened base, and this recipe keeps both.