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Boston Clam Chowder
Remove clams from can, strain juice. Cut slice salt pork into small cubes, and in it cook one thinly sliced onion until yellow. Add 1 cup water and the strained clam juice and simmer 10 minutes. Parboil 1 cup sliced potatoes, drain them, and pour the onion water over them through a strainer. Now add whole clams and let cook until the potatoes are tender, then boil mixture 3 minutes. Make a sauce of the butter, flour and milk, add seasonings. Combine the sauce with the cooked mixture and serve very hot. (If enjoyed, 1/4 teaspoon thyme may be added for flavor.)
A camp-kitchen chowder built around canned clams, thickened with a quick white sauce rather than the older ship's-biscuit method. The method text assumes an ingredient list that names the quantities of clams, pork, butter, flour and milk.
- Quantities to assumeThe instructions call for ingredients without amounts, so any figures are a guess on the editor's part rather than the book's. Scaled to the recipe's own 1 cup of water and 1 cup of sliced potatoes, something on the order of one 6.5 oz can of clams with its juice, a small slice of salt pork, a tablespoon or two each of butter and flour, and a cup or so of milk will balance.
- Add the clams last, brieflyThis is the hinge. Canned clams are already cooked; the direction to cook them with the potatoes and then boil three minutes will make them tough. Simmer the potatoes until tender first, then add the clams and heat through for a minute or two without boiling.
- Do not boil after the milk goes inOnce the flour-and-milk sauce is combined with the clam liquor, a hard boil risks curdling. Hold it just below a simmer and serve immediately.
- Salt porkPresent-day salt pork is generally milder and wetter than older barrel-cured pork. Render the cubes slowly over medium-low heat to draw the fat before the onion goes in, and hold back on added salt until the end.
- Parboiling the potatoesThe recipe gives no reason for the step, though draining does shed some surface starch. A few minutes in boiling water is enough for thin slices; the onion broth poured over them through the strainer finishes the cooking.
- Seasonings"Seasonings" here most likely means salt and pepper. The optional quarter teaspoon of thyme is offered without a stage; adding it with the onion lets it bloom in the fat.
- Yield and servingYield depends on the amounts assumed above, since the recipe fixes only 1 cup of water and 1 cup of potatoes. It thickens as it stands and reheats over low heat, though the clams suffer on a second heating.
Chowder in New England began as a shipboard and shoreline dish, layers of salt pork, fish or shellfish, onion and hard biscuit moistened with water and stewed in one pot. The milk-and-flour version that Boston came to claim is later, and the split between it and the tomato-based style associated with Manhattan hardened into a matter of local pride over the first half of the twentieth century. What marks this particular version is the can: canned clams, sold shucked with their liquor, let a cook produce chowder far from any tideline. The ship's biscuit has given way to a butter-and-flour sauce, in the manner of the white-sauce cookery taught in American cooking schools of the period.