Home › Soups Without Stock › Rhode Island Chowder
Rhode Island Chowder
1 quart clams. 3 inch cube fat salt pork 1 sliced onion ½ cup cold water 4 cups potatoes cut in ¾ inch cubes 2 cups boiling water 1 cup stewed and strained tomatoes ¼ teaspoon soda 1 cup scalded cream 1 cup scalded milk 2 tablespoons butter 8 common crackers Salt and pepper Cook pork with onion and cold water ten minutes; drain, and reserve liquor. Wash clams and reserve liquor. Parboil potatoes five minutes, and drain. To potatoes add reserved liquors, hard part of clams finely chopped, and boiling water. When potatoes are nearly done, add tomatoes, soda, soft part of clams, milk, cream, and butter. Season with salt and pepper. Split crackers, soak in cold milk to moisten, and reheat in chowder.
Fannie Farmer's Rhode Island chowder sits between the milk chowders of Massachusetts and the clear, tomato-touched broths of southern New England. The tomato is what makes it Rhode Island, and the pinch of soda is there to keep that tomato from curdling the dairy.
- The clamsThe method calls for washing clams and reserving their liquor, but the quantity is absent from the ingredient list; comparable chowders in this book call for about 1 quart of shucked clams with their liquor. Strain the liquor through cloth to catch grit.
- Hard and soft partsA quahog has a tough adductor muscle and mantle rim that need long cooking, and a soft belly that does not. Chop the hard part fine and add it with the potatoes; the soft part goes in at the very end and wants no more than two or three minutes, or it turns to rubber.
- The sodaA quarter teaspoon of baking soda neutralises enough tomato acid to stop the milk and cream breaking. Do not increase it, and stir it in with the tomato before the dairy goes near the pot.
- Keep it below a boilOnce the milk, cream, and butter are in, hold the chowder at a bare steam. Boiling after the dairy is added will curdle it despite the soda, and will toughen the clams.
- Potato sizeThe cubes should be about ¾ inch. Parboiling five minutes and draining removes some starch so the finished chowder stays loose rather than gluey.
- Fat salt porkModern salt pork is usually saltier and leaner than the 1896 article; rinse it, and hold back on added salt until the end. Blanching it with the onion in cold water, as directed, tempers both the salt and the onion.
- Common crackersThese are the dry, thick Vermont-style crackers that split into two rounds. Unsalted saltines or oyster crackers stand in, but use fewer and add them at the table, since they dissolve far faster than the original.
- ScaldingScalded milk and cream means heated to about 180F, just until a rim of bubbles forms. Adding them hot keeps the chowder from dropping out of temperature when they go in.
- YieldAbout 2 quarts, enough for six as a first course or four as a meal. Like most chowders it is better after standing an hour off the heat, reheated gently.
New England argues about chowder along state lines, and Rhode Island is the state that let the tomato in. Its clam chowders run from a clear broth with no dairy at all to versions like this one, where a cup of strained tomato tints an otherwise creamy pot, and the shore-dinner halls of Narragansett Bay served both well into the twentieth century. The clam in question is the quahog, the thick hard-shell clam that the bay produces in quantity and that gives up a great deal of savory liquor for very little money, which is why chowder belongs in a chapter of soups made without stock. Farmer's inclusion of baking soda is a piece of period chemistry that later cooks largely abandoned in favor of simply keeping the acid and the dairy apart until the last minute, but it shows a cooking-school instructor thinking about why a dish fails rather than only about how it is assembled.