Clam Chowder
25 clams 2 or 3 slices salt pork 6 potatoes 1 onion 1 quart milk 2 teaspoons salt 1/8 teaspoon pepper Chop hard parts of clams and cut salt pork fine. Slice potatoes and onion thin. Put pork into kettle and cook a short time; add potatoes, onion, salt, pepper and juice of clams. Cook 2 1/2 hours; then add clams. Boil 15 minutes and just before serving add hot milk.
Shell Fish a la Newburg 2 cups shrimp, scallops, lobster, or crab meat 2 tablespoons butter 1 tablespoon flour 1 cup milk 2 hard boiled eggs 1 teaspoon salt cayenne pepper to taste 1/4 teaspoon paprika 1/4 cup sherry If canned fish is used cover with cold water 20 minutes. Melt butter in saucepan; add flour and stir until smooth; add cold milk slowly; boil until thick. Rub yolks of eggs through strainer and add, stirring until smooth; add seasoning, and finely chopped whites of eggs; add fish which has been drained, dried and cut into small pieces; put all in top of double boiler over fire for 15 minutes; add sherry and serve with small pieces of toast.
Two recipes have run together on this page: a New England clam chowder and a shellfish Newburg. Both are workable, but the chowder's timings belong to a coal range that was going to be hot all afternoon anyway.
- The clams: two minutes, not fifteenBoiling shucked clams for a quarter of an hour turns them to rubber. Stir them in at the very end, off the heat or barely simmering, and give them a minute or two just to firm up. This is the one change that decides whether the chowder is good.
- Two and a half hours is not neededThinly sliced potatoes and onion in clam liquor are done in 15-20 minutes. The long cooking may simply reflect a pot left on the back of a range; simmer until the potatoes yield to a knife and stop there, or they collapse into starch.
- 25 clams means hard-shellThese are quahogs or large cherrystones, shucked, with the tough foot and adductor chopped and the soft bellies left whole. Twenty-five will give somewhere in the region of 2 cups of meat, depending on size. Canned chopped clams with their juice, about 20 oz in total, will stand in if fresh are not available.
- Clam juiceThe recipe assumes you have reserved the liquor from shucking, which is perhaps a cup and a half. If it does not cover the potatoes, add water or bottled clam juice rather than more milk at this stage.
- Do not boil the milkClam liquor is salty and the mixture can curdle if the milk is boiled in it. Heat the milk separately, as instructed, and add it just before serving with the pot off a hard boil.
- SaltTwo teaspoons is a great deal alongside salt pork and clam liquor, both already salty. Add half, then taste after the milk goes in. If the pork renders little fat, a tablespoon of butter helps.
- YieldServes 4 to 6 as a main course with crackers.
- On the Newburg"If canned fish is used cover with cold water 20 minutes" was presumably aimed at the flavour of early canned shellfish; it is unnecessary with today's product and only waterlogs it. Fifteen minutes in a double boiler is enough to heat cooked shellfish through, and the sherry goes in at the end, as the recipe has it, so it does not cook away.
Clam chowder built on salt pork, potatoes, onion and milk is the New England form, distinct from the tomato-based style later known as Manhattan. The word chowder is generally traced to the French chaudiere, a cauldron, by way of the fishing communities of the Atlantic coast, where the dish began as a shipboard and shoreside way of stretching whatever came out of the water with ship's biscuit and salt pork. Its appearance in a promotional cook book is a reminder of how those booklets worked: a handful of pages on fish and meat, none of which needed the sponsor's product, surrounding the cakes and biscuits that did.