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Washington Chowder
2 medium-sized potatoes, 1 1/2 cups sliced 1 1/2 cups water 1/2 small onion 1 cup stewed tomatoes 1 cup corn 1 cup milk 1 cup cream 1 teaspoon salt Slice the onion, and cook with the potatoes in the boiling, salted water. When tender, add the tomatoes and corn, and bring to the boiling point. Heat the cream and milk, and add to the vegetables just before serving. Serve hot over crackers.
A plain vegetable chowder that comes together in about half an hour. The only real technique in it is the last step, and that is where most people go wrong.
- Add the dairy last, off the heatAdd the dairy last -- the milk and cream go in warmed, just before serving, and the pot should not be brought back to a boil. Tomato acid and boiling milk can curdle the soup into visible grains; heating the dairy separately, as the original directs, avoids that risk, though the book does not explain the step.
- CreamIn earlier American kitchens "cream" was unstandardised and usually meant something thinner than today's heavy whipping cream, nearer light cream or half-and-half. Heavy cream will work but gives a much richer, heavier bowl.
- Stewed tomatoesPlain tomatoes stewed down, home-cooked or canned, not the seasoned supermarket product with peppers and celery. A cup of canned diced or crushed tomatoes with their juice is the closest match.
- CornThe recipe says only "1 cup corn," so canned or fresh both fit. Frozen kernels are fine; add them with the tomatoes so they only need to heat through.
- PotatoesSlice them thin, about an eighth of an inch, so they cook through in the 1 1/2 cups of water without needing more liquid. Waxy potatoes hold their shape; russets will break down and thicken the broth, which is not unwelcome.
- SaltA teaspoon goes into the cooking water with the potatoes and onion. Taste again after the tomatoes and corn go in, since canned vegetables may already be salted.
- Serving"over crackers" means saltines or common crackers laid in the bottom of the bowl, where they soften into the broth rather than being crumbled on top. The listed quantities come to something over six cups, so four to six servings.
Chowder in nineteenth-century New England was a fish or clam dish, layered with salt pork, potatoes and hard crackers; milk, which later came to seem defining, was a development of the century's later decades. The word is often said to derive from the French *chaudière*, the cauldron the stew was cooked in, though the derivation is traditional rather than settled. By the time this book was written the term had loosened to mean almost any milk-thickened vegetable soup with potatoes in it, and the form survived the loss of the fish, because everything else that mattered about a chowder — the potatoes, the milk, the crackers at the bottom of the bowl — remained. The corn-and-tomato combination places this squarely in the American canning era, when a household could open a summer vegetable in February; why it is called "Washington" is not documented, and regional and presidential names of this kind were attached to dishes in period cookbooks with very little consistency.