Fish Chowder
3 lbs. fresh fish 2 or 3 slices salt pork 6 medium sized potatoes 1 small onion 2 quarts milk 2 teaspoons salt 1/8 teaspoon pepper Cut salt pork in dice pieces; fry crisp, and turn the whole into chowder kettle. Pare potatoes and cut into pieces. Peel onion and chop fine. Put potatoes into kettle with part of onion. Cut fish into convenient pieces, and lay over potatoes; sprinkle over with rest of onion; add salt and pepper; add just enough water to come to top of fish; cover closely and cook until potatoes are done; add milk and let it scald up again. Pilot bread or crackers, split and soaked, may be added just before last boiling. If milk is not available a somewhat smaller quantity of water may be used.
A New England chowder in its plainest form: pork fat, potato, fish, milk. Two details in the original need translating, and one timing needs watching.
- The hinge: do not boil after the milk goes in"Let it scald up again" means bring it just to the point where the surface trembles and steam rises, around 180F. A rolling boil will curdle the milk and shred the fish into threads.
- Choice of fishCod, haddock, hake or pollock — firm white fish that holds in flakes. The recipe does not say whether the 3 lb is whole or dressed; if you are buying fillets, 2 to 2 1/2 lb is a reasonable reading, though 3 lb of whole fish would yield considerably less than that. Salmon and oily fish do not suit a milk broth.
- Salt porkTwo or three slices is perhaps 3 to 4 oz. Unsmoked salt pork or fatback is correct; thick-cut bacon works but brings smoke the original did not have. Render it slowly so the fat comes out and the dice go crisp, and leave the fat in the pot.
- Two quarts of milk is a lotWith only 3 lb of fish and six potatoes this produces a thin, soupy chowder in the old style rather than the thick modern kind. Whole milk is what is meant. Cutting the milk to a quart and a half, or replacing part of it with cream, gives a body closer to what most people now expect.
- "Just enough water to come to top of fish"Depending on the width of your pot this is likely to be two to four cups. Keep it as low as the instruction allows — the fish and potatoes release liquid, and the milk arrives later.
- Pilot breadA hard ship's biscuit; pilot bread is still made in some regions, though Nabisco's Crown Pilot crackers were discontinued in 2008. Common saltines or oyster crackers, soaked briefly in milk, do the same job of thickening. Add them at the end or they dissolve entirely.
- TimingPotatoes cut into 3/4-inch pieces take 12 to 15 minutes. The fish laid on top steams in about 8, so check the potatoes before you commit — if they are still hard, the fish will be overdone by the time they yield. Cutting the potatoes small is the fix.
- YieldSix to eight servings as a main course. Chowder is generally better the next day, reheated gently and never boiled.
Fish chowder is the northeastern American form of a family of one-pot fish soups found all along the North Atlantic, and the name is often said to derive from the French chaudière, the cauldron in which shore cooks and fishermen made it, though the derivation is traditional rather than established. The structure here — pork fat first, then potato, then fish, then milk added last — is the standard New England sequence found in cookbooks from the mid-nineteenth century onward. Pilot bread survives in the recipe as a relic of the days before potatoes were routine in chowder, when hard biscuit was the thickener of choice; the line about substituting water for milk shows that the dish tolerated either.