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Clam Chowder
4 cups potatoes cut in 3/4-inch cubes 1½ inch cube fat salt pork 1 sliced onion 1 tablespoon salt 1/8 teaspoon pepper 4 tablespoons butter 4 cups scalded milk 8 common crackers Clean and pick over clams, using one cup cold water; drain, reserve liquor, heat to boiling-point, and strain. Chop finely hard part of clams; cut pork in small pieces and try out; add onion, fry five minutes, and strain into a stewpan. Parboil potatoes five minutes in boiling water to cover; drain, and put a layer in bottom of stewpan, add chopped clams, sprinkle with salt and pepper, and dredge generously with flour; add remaining potatoes, again sprinkle with salt and pepper, dredge with flour, and add two and one-half cups boiling water. Cook ten minutes, add milk, soft part of clams, and butter; boil three minutes, and add crackers split and soaked in enough cold milk to moisten. Reheat clam water to boiling-point, and thicken with one tablespoon butter and flour cooked together. Add to chow der just before serving.
The clam water has a tendency to cause the milk to sepa rate, hence is added at the last. 1 quart clams
A layered New England chowder built without stock, thickened by dredged flour and softened crackers rather than a roux. The ingredient list runs short of the method: the quart of clams appears at the very end, and the flour used for dredging is left to your judgment.
- The hinge: add the clam liquor lastFannie Farmer flags it herself: the clam water tends to make the milk separate. Strain it, reheat it to the boiling-point, thicken it with the butter-and-flour paste, and add it to the chowder just before serving.
- Hard and soft partsA shucked clam has a tough muscle and neck and a soft belly. The chopped hard part cooks with the potatoes; the bellies go in with the milk and butter for the last three minutes only, or they toughen.
- How many clamsA quart of shucked clams is somewhere around 2 lb of meat; depending on size that might be four dozen large hard-shell clams or several dozen more of the smaller ones. Buying them shucked with their liquor saves the shucking step, though the recipe's cup of liquid comes from washing the clams in cold water and reserving what drains off.
- "Try out" the porkRender the 1½-inch cube of fat salt pork slowly until the fat runs and the scraps are golden, then fry the onion in it. Straining into the stewpan leaves the onion and cracklings behind; some cooks prefer to keep the crisp pork bits and stir them back in at the end.
- Common crackersBoston or Vermont common crackers are thick, dry, unsalted rounds, still made in New England but not widely stocked. Split and milk-soaked, they thicken the chowder and swell into soft dumplings; unsalted saltines or oyster crackers work, but use them generously and expect a thinner body.
- Flour and salt, unmeasuredThe recipe gives no quantity for the dredging flour; "dredge generously" is left to your judgment, perhaps a tablespoon or so over each layer. The finishing paste takes a tablespoon of flour cooked with its tablespoon of butter. A full tablespoon of salt is a lot given that the pork and the clam liquor are both salty — salt the layers lightly and correct at the end, once the pork and liquor are in.
- Scalded milkHeat the milk to about 180F, just until it steams and shivers at the edge. Scalding is generally understood to have helped keep milk sweet in the days before pasteurization; today it mainly keeps the chowder from stalling when the milk goes in. Whole milk is the safer reading of "milk" here.
- YieldSomewhere between three and four quarts, depending on how far it reduces; eight generous bowls as a main course. Reheat leftovers gently and don't let them boil once the milk and clam liquor are together.
Clam chowder in this form is the New England fisherman's pot moved indoors: salt pork rendered for fat, potatoes, milk, and whatever the tide gave up, with hard crackers standing in for the ship's biscuit that thickened the earlier versions. The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book places it among the "Soups Without Stock" because it needs no meat broth — the clam liquor and the pork do that work. Fannie Farmer's layering method, potatoes and clams built up in courses and dredged with flour between, is often said to be older than the roux-based chowders that later became common, and her note on the clam water separating the milk is the kind of observed chemistry that made the book's reputation. The common cracker she calls for was a New England staple of the period, sold from barrels and durable enough to keep for months; it survives today mostly as a regional specialty.