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German Chowder
Salt, pepper, cayenne 2 tablespoons melted butter Few drops onion juice 1 beaten egg 1 quart potatoes cut in 34-inch cubes 2-inch cube fat salt pork 1 sliced onion 5 tablespoons flour 1 quart scalded milk 1/4 cup butter 8 common crackers Clean, skin, and bone fish. Add to bones cold water and vegetables, and let simmer twenty minutes. Strain stock from bones. Chop fish meat; there should be one and onehalf cups. Add cracker, seasonings, melted butter and egg, then shape in small balls. Try out pork, add onion, and cook five minutes. Strain, and add to fat, potatoes, balls, and fish stock, and cook until potatoes are soft. Thicken milk with butter and flour cooked together. Combine mixtures, and season highly with salt, pepper, and cayenne. Add crackers, split and soaked in cold milk.
A fish chowder with poached forcemeat balls standing in for some of the fish, thickened with a milk-and-roux base. It is fussier than a plain chowder but the technique is straightforward once the order of operations is clear.
- The hinge: build the stock firstEverything depends on simmering the fish frames twenty minutes and straining well before anything else happens. A longer simmer turns fish stock bitter and cloudy, and the bones must be strained out completely before the potatoes go in.
- What fish to buyThe recipe does not name the fish or give a weight; any white-fleshed fish (cod, haddock, hake, pollock) will serve, bought whole with head and frame so the bones can make the stock. You need enough flesh to yield the one and a half cups of chopped fish called for, which is all the fish the recipe uses.
- Potato sizeThe cubes are meant to be ¾ inch. Cut them evenly or the small ones dissolve while the large ones stay hard; 1 quart is roughly 1½ lb of peeled potato.
- Common crackersThese are the hard, round New England crackers, split before use, not soda crackers. Unsalted water biscuits or pilot crackers are the nearest substitute. The cracker inside the fish balls should be rolled to crumbs; the eight finishing crackers are split and soaked whole.
- Trying out the porkA 2-inch cube of fat salt pork, diced and rendered slowly, gives the chowder its backbone. Render over medium-low heat until the scraps are golden, not brown, then cook the onion in the fat for five minutes and strain.
- Fish ballsChopped fish, cracker crumbs, egg and melted butter shaped into balls the size of a walnut. They poach in the chowder as the potatoes cook, about 15 minutes; do not let the pot boil hard or they break apart.
- ThickeningCook 5 tablespoons flour into ¼ cup butter for two minutes, then whisk in the scalded milk off the heat to avoid lumps. Combine with the fish and potatoes only at the end, and keep it below a boil once the milk is in.
- YieldNo yield is given; a quart of milk, a quart of potatoes and the fish stock make enough for roughly six to eight as a main course. The instruction to "season highly" is meant literally — a milk-based chowder needs more salt than it seems to.
Chowder in this book is a New England institution; the "German" tag may point to the forcemeat balls, since chopped fish or meat bound with egg and crumbs and poached in soup is a fixture of German cookery (Klösschen, Fischklösse) rather than of the Massachusetts fishing ports. The technique of trying out salt pork, layering potatoes and fish, and finishing with milk and split crackers is thoroughly local; the dumplings are the borrowed part. Common crackers, still made in Vermont, were the standard chowder cracker of the period and were commonly soaked before serving so they swelled rather than shattered.