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Corn Chowder
1 can corn. 4 cups potatoes, cut in 14-inch slices 1½-inch cube fat salt pork 1 sliced onion 4 cups scalded milk 8 common crackers 3 tablespoons butter Salt and pepper Cut pork in small pieces and try out; add onion and cook five minutes, stirring often that onion may not burn; strain fat into a stewpan. Parboil potatoes five minutes in boiling water to cover; drain, and add potatoes to fat; then add two cups boiling water; cook until potatoes are soft, add corn and milk, then heat to boiling-point. Season with salt and pepper; add butter, and crackers split and soaked in enough cold milk to moisten. Remove crackers, turn chowder into a tureen, and put crackers on top. slices, or
Fannie Farmer's chowder is straightforward once you account for a garbled ingredient list and two New England pantry items that no longer travel far outside the region. Note that the corn itself has dropped out of the printed list — the method calls for it, and one can (about 2 cups) of corn is what belongs there.
- The missing cornThe ingredient list as printed omits it, though the directions add corn after the potatoes soften. Use one 14-15 oz can of corn (about 1½ cups drained), or about 2 cups of kernels cut from cooked cobs.
- "14-inch slices"A typesetting casualty for ¼-inch slices. Cut the potatoes thin enough that they cook through quickly and some edges break down to thicken the broth.
- Fat salt pork and "try out"Salt pork is cured, unsmoked pork belly or fatback, sold near the bacon in many markets. To try it out is to render it slowly over low heat until the fat runs and the scraps are golden; blanched bacon is the nearest substitute but brings smoke the original does not have.
- Common crackersHard, spherical Boston or Montpelier crackers, split along the equator before soaking. Unsalted saltines or plain water biscuits will stand in, but they soften almost instantly — dip rather than soak, or they collapse.
- Scalded milkHeat to just under a simmer, when the surface trembles and a ring of bubbles forms at the edge. Scalding is usually explained as a holdover from the days of unpasteurized milk; in practice it mainly keeps the milk from chilling the pot and shortens the reheat.
- Do not let it boil hard"Heat to boiling-point" means bring it just up to the verge. A rolling boil after the milk goes in will curdle it.
- YieldRoughly four to six servings as a main course. Chowders are often said to improve on the second day, though the crackers must be soaked fresh each time.
Chowder in nineteenth-century New England meant a milk-or-water-based pot built on salt pork and hard crackers, fish being the original and corn a thrifty inland variation. The common cracker — a dense, dry, split-and-soak biscuit long associated with Vermont and coastal Massachusetts — is doing the work that flour or a roux would do elsewhere. Farmer places the dish in "Soups Without Stock" because it needs no meat broth: the rendered pork fat and the starch from the potatoes carry all the body required. That corn chowder appears alongside fish and clam versions in a Boston book of this period reflects how far canned corn had spread by the 1890s, making a summer vegetable into a year-round staple of the household larder.