Clam Chowder
50 clams 4 ounces salt pork 1 medium-sized onion 2 tablespoons flour 1/2 teaspoon salt 1/2 teaspoon thyme 3 potatoes 1 pint milk 1/2 teaspoon pepper 3 pilot biscuits Put clams, with their own liquor, into a granite-ware saucepan, and when they have come to a boil skim out the clams and return liquid to the fire. Cut the salt pork into thin slices, chop the onion, and saute the two together until brown. Stir in flour, and when mixture is bubbling slowly, add the clam liquor. Season with salt, white pepper, and thyme. Add potatoes which have been cut into small cubes, and cook this mixture until the potatoes are tender. Just before serving, add milk, clams cut into pieces, and three large pilot biscuit or a larger number of hard water-crackers, as preferred. If liked thicker, blend one tablespoon of butter or other fat with the same of flour, and add gradually. To make Rhode Island clam chowder, add tomatoes, either canned or fresh.
A New England chowder built on clam liquor rather than a heavy cream base, with the crackers stirred in at the end to thicken it. The critical point is the clams themselves.
- Do not cook the clams twiceThe clams are removed as soon as the liquor boils and returned only just before serving. Clams toughen to rubber within a couple of minutes of heat; add them at the very end and let them warm through off the boil.
- Fifty clamsProbably small hard-shell clams, littlenecks or cherrystones, which would yield roughly 2 to 3 cups of shucked meat and about a pint of liquor. Canned chopped clams with their juice can substitute, though the liquor will be saltier.
- Grit in the liquorStrain the clam liquor through a fine sieve or cloth before it goes into the roux. Sand settles out during the initial boil and will otherwise carry through to the finished bowl.
- Salt porkSold in 1-lb slabs; 4 oz is a piece about the size of a deck of cards. Thick-cut unsmoked bacon works, but smoked bacon changes the flavor noticeably. Render it slowly so the fat comes out before the pork browns.
- Granite-wareEnameled steel. A nonreactive pan is what matters here, since clam liquor and tomatoes attack bare iron or tin; any nonreactive pan -- stainless, enameled cast iron -- does the same job.
- Pilot biscuitsLarge, hard ship's biscuit, sold in New England for much of the twentieth century as Crown Pilot crackers, though these are no longer produced. Common saltines will work if crumbled in at the end, but use fewer, as they carry their own salt; oyster crackers are another widely available stand-in.
- Salt and the seasoning orderThe ingredient list gives 1/2 teaspoon pepper while the method calls for white pepper -- use white to keep the chowder pale. Hold back the salt until the clam liquor and pork have gone in, as both are already salty.
- YieldServes 4 to 6 as a first course, 4 as a main. Reheat gently; boiling after the clams and milk are in will both toughen the clams and risk curdling.