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Connecticut Clam Chowder
3 SLICES SALT PORK 2 CUPS CHOPPED ROUND CLAMS CLAM LIQUOR I QUART BOILING WATER I QUART POTATOES, SLICED THICK I ONION, SLICED SALT AND PEPPER 2-3 PILOT CRACKERS Dice pork and fry brown. Make sure clams are free of grit, and chop hard parts well or they will cook tough. Strain clam liquor, add to boiling water and then to fried pork, preferably in a 3-legged black kettle resembling a witch's cauldron. Put in potatoes and onions and cook until potatoes are tender. Add clams, cook 3 minutes, season, and pour over crackers which have been toasted, buttered, and broken.
This is an old recipe antedating the method of arranging ingredients in layers and hence best suited to the prescribed round-bottomed iron pot. It was taken over direct from the Indians, along with everything else they had, and pioneers of the Nutmeg State only added the pilot crackers. In eating it, the best thing to do is go native with an Indian clamshell spoon, consisting of a shapely shell, blanched, polished, and fastened to the end of a conveniently curved stick, somewhat on the style of a tomahawk. The crunchiness of pilot crackers adds zest to all seashore soups, and no real Connecticut Yankee would attempt a clam chowder without them.
A clear-broth chowder with no milk, cream or tomato, thickened only by potato starch and the crackers it is poured over. The timing on the clams is the whole recipe.
- Three minutes means three minutesClams added to boiling broth are done almost immediately; past about five minutes they tighten into rubber. Add them at the very end, off the heat if the pot is heavy and holding a hard simmer.
- Round clamsThese are quahogs (hard-shell clams). Two cups chopped is roughly a pound of shucked meat, perhaps a dozen and a half medium quahogs. Chowder clams, the largest grade, are the ones most in need of thorough chopping.
- The liquorStrain it through a coffee filter or several layers of cheesecloth, not just a sieve; quahog liquor carries fine sand that a mesh strainer passes straight through. Expect roughly a cup from a good batch.
- Salt lastBetween the salt pork and the clam liquor the broth is already well salted. Season only after the clams are in, and taste before adding anything.
- Pilot crackersHardtack-style sea biscuits; Nabisco's Crown Pilot was the New England brand, long since discontinued, and oyster crackers or plain saltines are the usual substitute, though they soften faster. The recipe wants them toasted, buttered and broken in the bowl with the chowder poured over -- and it insists on their crunchiness.
- The potA round-bottomed, three-legged iron kettle is what the instruction describes. Any heavy 4-6 quart pot works on a stove; the author's stated reason for the shape is that this older version mixes the ingredients rather than layering them.
- PotatoesA quart sliced thick is about 1 1/2 lb. Cut them at least half an inch thick so they hold together, and use a waxy or all-purpose potato rather than a russet, which will fall apart into the broth.
- YieldServes six as a main course, eight as a first course.
Clear-broth chowder is the older New England form, though it is Rhode Island rather than Connecticut that is usually named as its stronghold: no milk, no thickening, no tomato, just pork fat, potato, clam and the crackers that stand in for the ship's biscuit of the earliest chowder recipes. The word chowder is generally traced to the French chaudi\though though other derivations have been proposed. The layered method the author dismisses here — pork, then crackers, then fish, then potato, repeated — was common in printed American chowder recipes through the nineteenth century. The claim that the dish was "taken over direct from the Indians" reflects a common assumption of the period rather than the record; coastal Algonquian peoples were certainly harvesting and cooking quahogs long before European arrival, but the pork, the potato and the biscuit are all colonial additions, which is most of the pot. Nutmeg State is the standing nickname for Connecticut.