Shrimp Chowder
Prepare the same as lobster chowder, substituting shrimps for lobster meat. 4 cup salt pork fat
A cross-reference recipe of the kind that fills the soup chapters of turn-of-the-century books: the method lives elsewhere, and only the substitution and the fat are spelled out. A few things need translating before it will work at a modern stove.
- The "4 cup salt pork fat" lineAlmost certainly a mangled fraction — quarter-cup of rendered salt pork fat, which is what a New England milk chowder of this size wants. Four cups would be several times the fat of the entire soup, so treat the printed figure as a typographical casualty rather than an instruction.
- Rendering the porkDice two or three ounces of salt pork small and render it slowly until the scraps are crisp and gold; the fat, not the meat, is the flavour base. Cook the onion in that fat before the milk goes in.
- Shrimp timing is the hingeThe lobster chowder this refers to would have used meat already cooked, so the timing built into it will not suit raw shrimp. Raw shrimp need two to three minutes in hot liquid and no more — add them off the boil at the very end, or they turn to erasers in a chowder that is otherwise gentle.
- What kind of shrimpThe 1907 cook may well have been working with small Atlantic or Gulf shrimp, canned ones included. Modern medium shrimp (around 36–40 count), peeled and cut once across if large, are about the right scale; roughly a pound suits a chowder of this sort.
- CurdlingA chowder built on whole milk with salt pork and shellfish will break if it boils. Bring it to a bare shiver only. Scalding the milk separately and adding it to the pork-and-onion base helps.
- Common crackersNew England milk chowders of this type are typically thickened with split common crackers or pilot biscuit soaked in milk, and the lobster chowder referred to is likely to be one of them. Oyster crackers or unsalted saltines stand in; a spoonful of cracker crumbs will also thicken if you want body without floating pieces.
- SeasoningSalt pork varies enormously in salinity. Season at the very end, after the pork and any canned shrimp liquor have had their say.
- YieldBuilt at the scale suggested above (about a quart of milk, a pound of shrimp, crackers), it would feed four as a main course or six as a first course.
Lowney's Cook Book was written by Maria Willett Howard and published in 1907 by the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate and cocoa maker — one of many food firms that issued a full general cookbook rather than a pamphlet. Its soup chapter is thoroughly New England, and this shrimp chowder sits in the milk-and-salt-pork tradition rather than the tomato one: chowder in Massachusetts meant pork fat, onion, milk and crackers, with whatever came out of the water added last. The habit of writing a recipe as a one-line variation on the recipe above it was standard practice in the period, and the reader was evidently assumed to be reading the chapter straight through. Why shrimp appear here as a substitute for lobster rather than in a recipe of their own is a matter for speculation.