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Soups (Peck of clams in shell)
1/2 peck of clams in shell 3 potatoes 1/2 pound bacon 1 tablespoon chopped onion 1/2 saltspoon 1 quart hot milk 6 rolled crackers 1 tablespoon chopped parsley 1/2 teaspoon salt pepper Wash the clams and place them over the fire in a large covered kettle, with sufficient water to keep the under ones from burning. When the shells at the top have opened, remove all the clams, and when cool enough to handle take them from the shells. Remove the skins and cut into small pieces, leaving the soft part whole. Let the liquor settle; then pour off the top, being careful not to take any of the sediment.
Cut the potatoes into small dice and parboil them, pouring off the water afterward. Cut the bacon in very thin slices and fry. Remove the bacon and fry the onion in the bacon fat and strain. Then boil bacon, onions and potatoes together until the potatoes are tender Use just enough boiling water to cover them, and drain when done.
Reheat the clams and their liquor; add the hot milk, seasoning, rolled crackers, bacon, onion and potatoes; let all simmer together for five minutes; add the parsley and serve.
A New England-style clam chowder written for a cook who bought clams by volume in the shell. The measurements need translating, but the method is sound and the sequence matters.
- Half a peck of clamsA peck is 8 dry quarts, so half a peck is roughly 4 quarts of clams in the shell, i.e. several pounds of hard-shell clams. That yields something on the order of a pint or less of shucked meat.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is usually reckoned at a quarter teaspoon, so half a saltspoon is about an eighth of a teaspoon. The ingredient it belongs to has dropped out of the printed list; since salt and pepper are both listed separately, what this half saltspoon measured cannot be recovered from the text.
- Rolled crackersThese were hard common crackers or water crackers, crushed with a rolling pin — a period thickener for chowder. Crushed saltines or oyster crackers stand in, but six common crackers are considerably larger than six saltines, so judge by how far the milk thickens as it stands.
- Do not let it boil after the milk goes inSalty clam liquor and milk held at a hard boil can curdle, and the clams toughen with prolonged cooking. Keep it to the gentle five minutes the recipe specifies and no longer.
- Pouring off the liquorClams shed sand into their cooking liquid, and the instruction to decant off the top and leave the sediment is the whole reason this chowder is not gritty. Let the pot stand undisturbed several minutes, then ladle rather than pour.
- Removing the skinsThis refers to the tough dark skin on the neck or siphon. Slit it, strip it, chop the firm neck small, and leave the soft belly whole as directed.
- Bacon and onionHalf a pound of bacon for this quantity is generous by modern taste; rather less renders enough fat. Note the sequence: the fat is strained after the onion is fried, and the onion goes back in to boil with the bacon and potatoes.
- YieldWith a quart of milk plus the clam liquor, this makes roughly 2 quarts — six generous bowls or eight first-course servings.
Buying shellfish by the peck rather than the pound tells you how close the American kitchen still was to the shore and the market cart in the early twentieth century: clams came in bulk, in shell, and the cook did the shucking. This is the milk-based chowder of southern New England and the mid-Atlantic, thickened not with flour but with crushed hard crackers, which is the older practice — ship's biscuit and common crackers were the standard body for a fish chowder long before roux entered the recipe.