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Sanitorium Corn Chowder
1 quart of potatoes cut in dices or small pieces, cover with 1½ pints of boiling water. Let stand until onions are ready to add. Slice 5 small onions and fry in butter 10 minutes; add to potatoes and cook until done. Add 1 pint of milk, 1 pint of corn, either canned or fresh, salt and pepper to suit taste. Boil 5 minutes and remove from fire.
— Mrs. E. Knight
A plain milk-and-vegetable chowder with no salt pork and no thickening — the potatoes do all the work. A few points on quantities and sequence.
- A quart of potatoesVegetables were measured by volume, not weight. A quart of diced potato is roughly 1.25 to 1.5 lb, or three or four medium boiling potatoes. Cut them small, around half an inch, so they cook evenly.
- Liquid amountsA pint and a half of boiling water is 3 cups; the pint of milk and pint of corn are 2 cups each. The finished chowder is fairly thin by modern standards — hold back some of the water if you want it closer to a stew.
- Do not boil after the milk goes inMilk at a rolling boil will catch on the bottom and can curdle against the salt and any acidity in the corn. Bring it just to a bare simmer and hold it there for five minutes instead.
- The onionsFive small onions is a generous amount, well over two cups sliced. Ten minutes in butter over moderate heat should soften and lightly colour them; do not rush it.
- Letting the potatoes standThe pause while the onions fry is not idle time; the potatoes sit in the boiling water and begin cooking before they go back on the fire.
- CornCanned corn is already cooked and needs only heating through. A pint of fresh kernels is three or four ears; they will want a couple of extra minutes at a simmer before the milk goes in, or they will stay starchy.
- YieldMakes close to three quarts, enough for six to eight as a first course or five or six as a supper dish. It thickens on standing and reheats over low heat.
The name points to the sanatorium movement rather than to any hospital diet in the modern sense: through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, health resorts and sanatoriums in the United States were widely associated with plain, digestible, often meatless cooking, and "sanitarium" recipes circulated in community cookbooks as a mark of wholesomeness. That shows here in what is missing: the base that opens many chowders of the period is replaced by butter, and there are no crackers or flour to thicken. Philathea cookbooks were compiled by Philathea classes, the young women's Sunday-school organisation that spread through Protestant churches from the 1890s onward, and their contents are contributed recipes signed by name, as this one is, though nothing in the recipe itself establishes the source volume as a Philathea book. Corn chowder itself belongs to the broader family of American milk chowders, generally traced to the fish chowders of the New England coast and adapted inland wherever corn was cheaper than cod.