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Connecticut Chowder
4 lb. cod or haddock 2½ cups stewed and 4 cups potatoes cut in 3/4strained tomatoes inch cubes 1½-inch cube fat salt pork 1 sliced onion 3 tablespoons butter ⅔ cup cracker crumbs Salt and pepper Prepare same as Fish Chowder, using liquor drained from bones for cooking potatoes, instead of additional water. Use tomatoes in place of milk and add cracker crumbs just before serving. 1 quart clams
The ingredient list has come through the scanner with its two columns interleaved, and the recipe leans entirely on the Fish Chowder entry a page or two earlier. Untangled, it is a tomato-based fish chowder for six to eight.
- The ingredient list, sorted out4 lb cod or haddock; 4 cups potatoes in 3/4-inch cubes; 2 1/2 cups stewed and strained tomatoes; a 1 1/2-inch cube of fat salt pork; 1 sliced onion; 3 tablespoons butter; 1/2 cup cracker crumbs; salt and pepper. The trailing "1 quart clams" belongs to the clam chowder that follows, not here.
- Four pounds means fish with bonesThe weight is for a whole dressed fish or a bone-in piece, because the recipe depends on simmering head, skin and bones for the cooking liquid. Buying 4 lb of skinless fillet leaves you no stock; ask for the frame, or use about 2 lb of fillet plus a fish stock.
- The method it points toFish Chowder runs roughly: skin and bone the fish, cut it into 2-inch pieces, simmer the trimmings in water for 20 minutes and strain. Try out the diced salt pork, cook the onion in the fat, then layer potatoes and fish in the pot, cover with the strained fish liquor, and simmer until the potatoes are tender.
- Tomatoes in place of milk"Stewed and strained" tomatoes are cooked tomatoes pushed through a sieve, so a can of whole tomatoes blitzed and strained, or a good passata, is the equivalent. Stir them in near the end and keep the pot below a boil; the fish is already cooked and will shred if it is churned.
- The cracker crumbs are the hingeThey go in just before serving and are the only thickener in the dish. Add them off the heat and give them two or three minutes to swell; boiled long, they turn to paste and the chowder loses its body. Common crackers or plain unsalted saltines are the right texture.
- Salt pork quantityA 1 1/2-inch cube is roughly 2 ounces. Blanched thick-cut bacon works, though it brings smoke the original does not have. Render it slowly so the fat is clear and the scraps crisp.
- Seasoning orderBetween the pork, the crackers and the tomatoes, salt accumulates. Season at the very end, after the crumbs have gone in.
Chowders like this one are what most people now call Manhattan style, though that label and the sharper tomato-versus-milk partisanship belong largely to a later period than this printing. New England cooks generally treated milk or cream as the default, and the tomato version travelled along the Long Island Sound coast, which is presumably how it acquired the name Connecticut here rather than any documented Hartford origin. The book puts it under "Soups Without Stock," and indeed the fish frame supplies the liquid, so no beef or veal broth is required. The cracker crumbs stirred in at the last minute are the older habit of the two thickenings; before flour-and-butter roux became standard in American home cooking, hard ship's biscuit or common crackers were the usual way to give a chowder substance, and in earlier versions whole split crackers were laid in the bottom of the tureen. The resentment of tomatoes in chowder outlasted the recipe: a bill to outlaw the practice is often reported to have been introduced in the Maine legislature in the late 1930s, and it is quoted more often than it is documented.