Corn Chowder
2 slices fat salt pork 1 onion 3 cups diced boiled potatoes Salt and pepper 2 cups boiling water 1 cup cooked corn, fresh or canned 4 cups hot milk Cut the pork into small pieces and try it out. In this cook the sliced onion. Strain the fat into another receptacle, and put the potatoes into the strained fat. Add boiling water, corn which has been cooked till tender, and hot milk. Season with salt and white pepper, bring to the boiling-point, and serve with a cracker on each soup-plate.
A plain New England-style chowder that leans on the rendered pork fat for its whole flavour base. Two of its instructions are worth reading carefully before you start.
- "Try it out"This means render the diced salt pork slowly over low heat until the fat runs and the scraps turn golden. Rushing it over high heat browns the outside and leaves the fat inside; give it 8-10 minutes.
- Strain the fatThe point of straining is to leave the pork scraps and onion behind and cook the potatoes in clean fat. Some cooks keep the crisped pork bits and stir them back in at the end rather than discarding them.
- Fat salt porkSalt pork is cured pork belly or fatback, still sold in some supermarkets and at butchers. Thick-cut bacon is the closest substitute, though it brings a smoke note the original does not have.
- Don't boil the milk"Bring to the boiling-point" here means bring just to the edge and stop. Four cups of milk held at a boil can curdle against the salt and the starch, and the chowder will look broken.
- The cornOne cup of cooked kernels, cut from about two ears, or a drained 8 oz can. Frozen corn works and needs only a few minutes in simmering water.
- White pepperSpecified so no black flecks show in a pale soup. Black pepper tastes somewhat different and will show in the soup; use whichever you prefer.
- YieldRoughly ten cups, serving six as a first course or four as a main. It thickens overnight and will need thinning with milk when reheated, gently.
- The crackerA cracker was set in the plate to soften in the broth. Any plain unsalted soda cracker or oyster crackers do the same job.
Chowder in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American cookbooks is defined less by its main ingredient than by its method: salt pork tried out, aromatics softened in the fat, potatoes, then milk. Fish and clam versions came first along the New England coast, and corn chowder is generally taken to be the inland, thrifty descendant, built from the pantry and root cellar. The canned-corn option reflects how canned vegetables had made a summer soup into a year-round one. The cracker laid in the plate is the older habit here, plausibly a survival from the days when hard bread, not a roux or flour, gave a chowder its body.