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Fish Mulligan or Slumgullion
With fish, clams or both use salt pork, onion, potatoes and stale bread or pilot crackers to thicken.
This is a camp formula rather than a written-out recipe: it names the parts and leaves the proportions to whoever is standing over the fire. What follows fills in the working details.
- Working proportionsFor four people, figure about 4 oz salt pork, two medium onions, three or four potatoes, and 1 1/2 lb of firm fish fillet or a quart of shucked clams. Water or stock to cover, no more; a mulligan should be thick enough to eat with a fork.
- Pilot crackersPilot bread, of the same family as hardtack, is a dense, barely leavened ship's biscuit long associated with New England and still a staple in Alaska. Crumbled in at the end it swells and binds the broth. Stale white bread or plain crackers do the same job; a couple of ounces will noticeably thicken a quart.
- Salt pork firstRender the diced pork slowly until the fat runs and the bits are gold, then cook the onion in that fat. This is the entire seasoning base, so do not rush it and do not add salt until the end.
- Order of cookingPotatoes need 12-15 minutes at a bare simmer; fish needs 5 or 6, and shucked clams 2 or 3. Put the fish and clams in last. Anything longer and the fish shreds to threads and the clams turn to erasers.
- Clam gritIf you are using clams in the shell, steam them separately, strain the liquor through a cloth to catch sand, and use that liquor as the cooking liquid. Chowder and mulligan alike are ruined by grit.
- Fish to useAnything firm and non-oily: cod, haddock, pollock, halibut, or a freshwater catch such as pike or lake trout. Oily fish like mackerel overwhelms the pork and potato.
- FinishingBlack pepper and a bay leaf, with the pork's own salt, suit it. Milk or cream is not part of a mulligan, though a splash off the heat moves it toward chowder if that is what you want.
Mulligan was a standing name for the communal pot in North American hobo and work camps from around the turn of the twentieth century: whatever the group had between them, cooked in one vessel, with potatoes and onions as the reliable frame. Slumgullion is older and looser, a nineteenth-century word for a thin, muddy mess, sometimes applied to the residue from whaling or mining before it settled on stew; Mark Twain used it in Roughing It for a weak, unidentifiable beverage. A fish version of the pot is really coastal chowder stripped to camp conditions, the salt pork, onion, potato and biscuit being exactly the four things a fisherman or a shore party could count on carrying.