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Fish Chowder
4 lb. cod or haddock 1½-inch cube fat salt pork 6 cups potatoes cut in 14-inch 1 tablespoon salt ⅛ teaspoon pepper 3 tablespoons butter 4 cups scalded milk 1 sliced onion 8 common crackers 4 cups potatoes cut in 34-inch cubes Order the fish skinned, but head and tail left on. Cut off head and tail and remove fish from backbone. Cut fish in two-inch pieces and set aside. Put head, tail, and backbone broken in pieces, in stewpan; add two cups cold water and bring slowly to boiling-point; cook twenty minutes. Cut salt pork in small pieces and try out, add onion, and fry five minutes; strain fat into stewpan. Parboil potatoes five minutes in boiling water to cover; drain and add potatoes to fat; then add two cups boiling water and cook five minutes. Add liquor drained from bones, then add the fish; cover, and simmer ten minutes. Add milk, salt, pepper, butter, and crackers split and soaked in enough cold milk to moisten, otherwise they will be soft on the outside, but dry on the inside. Pilot bread is sometimes used in place of common crackers.
A classic New England milk chowder built in layers: bone broth, rendered pork fat, potatoes, then fish and milk at the end. The ingredient list has some garbled fractions, so trust the method text over the numbers.
- Buy the whole fishThe recipe depends on the head, tail and backbone for its stock, so ask the fishmonger for a whole cod or haddock, skinned and gutted, with the frame kept. If you can only get fillets, buy about 2 lb of fish and 1 lb of fish frames or use a light fish stock.
- Potato quantityThe ingredient list gives potatoes twice, with different amounts and cut sizes; these read as alternatives (a larger quantity cut thin, or a smaller quantity in bigger cubes) rather than one contradictory instruction. Four cups cut in roughly 3/4-inch pieces is the safer reading for 4 lb of fish.
- PepperThe stated 1 1/2 teaspoons of pepper is out of proportion to the rest of the seasoning and looks like a misprint; comparable chowders of this style call for about 1/8 teaspoon. Season lightly and adjust at the end.
- Try out the pork"Try out" means render the diced salt pork slowly over low heat until the fat runs and the scraps are golden. Straining the fat into the pan is what carries the pork flavour through the whole pot; the crisp scraps can go on top at serving.
- Do not boil after the milk goes inOnce the scalded milk is added, hold the chowder just below a simmer. Boiling curdles the milk against the salt and the fish acids, and it breaks the fish into shreds.
- Fish timingTen minutes of gentle simmering is right for two-inch pieces of thick cod; thinner haddock will be done in five to seven. The fish should just flake and no more.
- Common crackers and pilot breadCommon crackers are the dry, puffy New England round sold split; pilot bread is the same idea in a larger, harder biscuit. Unsalted saltines or oyster crackers substitute, though they dissolve faster, so add them at the table rather than in the pot.
- Rest itChowder is better after standing 20 to 30 minutes off the heat, then reheated gently. Made as written this feeds eight to ten as a main course.
Chowder in New England began as a shipboard and shoreline dish of layered salt pork, ship's biscuit and whatever fish came aboard, cooked in one pot; the name is usually traced either to the French chaudière, a cauldron, or to an English dialect word for a fish hawker, and neither derivation is settled. Fannie Farmer's version shows the dish at the point where it had become a respectable middle-class supper rather than a sailor's mess: the biscuit is still there, but soaked in milk so it will not go leathery, and the pot is finished with scalded milk and butter instead of water. Cod and haddock were cheap and constant in Boston markets, which is why a four-pound fish appears here without comment. The later rule against tomatoes in a New England chowder does not arise here at all.