Potato Chowder
3/4 pint sliced tomatoes 1 pint boiling water 1 teaspoon salt 1/2 small onion 1 1/2 cups milk 1/2 cup cream Put the potatoes to cook in the boiling water with the salt and sliced onion. When tender, put two-thirds of them through a colander, and add to the remainder of the potatoes. Add the milk and cream, reheat, and serve over crackers. This quantity should make one quart.
A plain milk-based chowder with no fat, no thickener and no fish — typical of meatless cookery of the era. The ingredient list as printed has an obvious error worth sorting out before you start.
- The tomato line is a misprintThe list opens with "3/4 pint sliced tomatoes" but the method never mentions tomatoes and calls for potatoes twice. Read it as 3/4 pint of sliced potatoes — roughly 1 1/2 cups sliced, or about 1/2 lb of peeled potatoes. Tomatoes and milk in this proportion would be liable to curdle in any case.
- Pints and gillsPints -- A pint here is presumably the US pint, 2 cups. So: about 1 1/2 cups sliced potatoes cooked in 2 cups boiling water, finished with 1 1/2 cups milk and 1/2 cup cream. Yield is the quart the author promises, serving three or four as a first course.
- "Through a colander" means a puréeA colander in this period was often a perforated bowl used as a coarse sieve — the potato is pushed through with a spoon or pestle. A food mill or a few pulses of a masher does the same job. Avoid a blender or food processor, which turns cooked potato gluey.
- Keep the cooking waterThe recipe never says to drain, and it should not be drained. The starchy water is the entire body of the soup; the puréed two-thirds is the only thickener.
- Reheat, do not boilOnce the milk and cream go in, bring it just to steaming. Boiled milk in a starchy potato base scorches on the bottom of the pan quickly and gives the whole soup a cooked-milk flavour.
- Choose a starchy potatoRussets or another floury variety break down and purée smoothly. Waxy potatoes hold their shape and leave you with a thin broth carrying chunks.
- Season at the endThe single teaspoon of salt goes into 2 cups of water and much of it stays in the finished soup, but 2 cups of dairy will flatten it. Taste after the milk goes in, and add pepper, which the original omits entirely.
- The crackersServing soup poured over crackers in the bowl was common in this period; common crackers or oyster crackers are the likely intention. They soften almost at once, so add them at the table rather than in the pot.
Chowder in nineteenth-century America was defined less by fish than by its structure: layers or chunks cooked in liquid, finished with milk, and eaten over hard crackers, a form often traced to a shipboard and coastal habit of building a meal on ship's biscuit. Meatless cookbooks — along with hospital and sanitarium kitchens — found the form easy to adapt, since removing the salt pork and the fish from a potato chowder still leaves a recognizable chowder. What is notable here is the absence of any fat or roux at all: the thickening comes entirely from pushing most of the cooked potato through a sieve, a technique that produced the smooth, bland, digestible soups those kitchens prized on principle.