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Lobster Chowder
2 lb. lobster 4 cups milk 3 tablespoons butter 1 slice onion 1 cup cold water
What survives here is the ingredient column, not the method — the working instructions are missing, and even the list is short of what a chowder needs. Read it as a proportion sheet for the classic Boston-school lobster chowder rather than a set of directions.
- The list is incompleteAs printed there is no thickening, no salt or pepper, and no crackers. Farmer's chowders of this type are thickened with about 3 tablespoons flour worked into the butter, seasoned with roughly a teaspoon of salt and a little pepper, and served over common crackers. Work from a full modern chowder recipe for the method.
- "2 lb. lobster" means the whole animalThat is one live lobster of about two pounds, which yields roughly 6 to 8 ounces of picked meat. If you buy meat alone, half a pound is close, but you lose the shells and body that make the cup of broth.
- The cup of cold water is stock, not liquid fillerThe body shell and small claws are broken up, covered with the cold water, brought slowly to a boil and strained. That extraction is what separates lobster chowder from lobster in milk; skipping it flattens the whole dish.
- The slice of onion flavours the milkIt is scalded in the milk and then removed, not diced into the chowder. Scald means bringing the milk just to the point where bubbles form at the edge; by modern reckoning that is around 180F, though the recipe gives no temperature. Boiled milk will catch and taste cooked.
- Tomalley and coralPeriod recipes work the green tomalley and the red coral into the butter for colour and richness. Current shellfish advisories recommend discarding tomalley, which concentrates contaminants and marine toxins; the meat itself is unaffected.
- Add the lobster meat lastCut it in dice and let it heat through in the finished chowder for a minute or two off the boil. Lobster held at a simmer turns fibrous and squeaky very quickly.
- YieldFour cups of milk plus the broth and meat makes about four generous bowls as a first course, or three as a supper.
Chowder in New England began as a fisherman's dish — the name is generally traced to the French chaudière, the cauldron in which the catch was cooked — and it was built on salt pork, ship's biscuit and whatever came up in the nets. By the time this book appeared the form had moved indoors and up the social scale: the pork fat gives way to butter, the biscuit to common crackers, and the base is milk rather than water. Lobster was a plausible choice for a Boston cooking school because it had long been a common coastal food in Massachusetts and Maine — cheap enough at one time to be canned and fed to institutions — though by the end of the nineteenth century it was already climbing in price and appearing as a restaurant delicacy on its way to being reinvented as a luxury. Its place in the "Soups Without Stock" chapter is a piece of household logic: no beef or veal stockpot is needed, since the lobster shells make their own broth in a cup of cold water.