Clam Chowder
9 Clams 1 Tablespoon Salt Pork, cut into cubes 1/2 Cup Carrots, cubed 2 Cup Onions, sliced 2 Cup, Celery, chopped 1/2 Cup Tomatoes 1 Cup Potatoes, Cubed Pepper 1 Quart Water Brown salt pork and onions together.
Clean and pick clams, reserving the liquor, and chopping the hard part fine.
Cook potatoes, carrots, and celery in boiling salted water (1 quart) until almost done. Add clam liquor, salt pork, onions, chopped hard part of clams and tomatoes. For last three minutes of cooking add soft part of clams; season with salt and pepper. Add oleomargarine just before serving.
A tomato-inflected chowder with no milk in it, written in the clipped shorthand of a mid-century bridal shower book. The measurements are loose in places, and the clam anatomy will be unfamiliar to anyone who buys shellfish shucked.
- The hinge: hard part, soft partA shucked hard-shell clam has a tough adductor muscle, mantle rim and neck, and a soft belly. The tough parts are chopped fine and given the full simmer; the soft parts go in for the last three minutes only. Reverse that and the bellies turn to rubber while the muscle stays leathery.
- "9 Clams"Probably quahogs (large hard-shell clams), the usual reading of an unqualified "clam" in chowder recipes of this sort. Nine large quahogs might yield something like a cup of chopped meat and a cup of liquor. Littlenecks would need several times the count.
- Clam liquorStrain it through a fine sieve or a coffee filter before it goes into the pot. Liquor poured straight off shucked clams carries sand, and there is nothing to be done about grit once it is in the soup.
- OleomargarineMargarine, and in the 1940s and 50s often the uncolored kind sold with a capsule of dye to be kneaded in. Butter is the obvious substitute. No quantity is given; a tablespoon or two stirred in off the heat is in keeping with the scale of the recipe.
- Vegetable proportionsTwo cups each of onion and celery against one cup of potato is a great deal of aromatic for a quart of water. If you want the clams to read as the main flavor, halve the onion and celery.
- Salt porkOne tablespoon of cubed salt pork is a small amount, meant as flavoring rather than fat. The recipe browns it with the onions; if you would rather it not scorch before it gives anything up, render it slowly over medium heat first and add the onions after.
- No thickening, no milkThis is the clear, tomato-tinted style rather than a cream chowder. Nothing here will thicken except the starch off the potatoes, so cut them small and let them soften fully if you want any body.
- YieldA quart of water plus six cups of measured vegetables and the clam liquor makes a generous pot — enough for four to six servings.
Tomatoes in clam chowder are the fault line in American chowder argument, and this recipe sits squarely on the New York side of it — the style now called Manhattan clam chowder, thin-bodied, reddened rather than red, with no milk at all. The name Manhattan is often said to have been applied by partisans of the cream version as an insult, though both the dating and the motive belong to folklore rather than the record; the tomato style itself is older, and is traditionally associated with Rhode Island and the Portuguese fishing communities of southern New England, where tomato and clam are said to have long been paired. That it turns up in a bride's cook book is telling: these little collections, often compiled by churches, clubs or utility companies and given to new wives, seem generally to have favored dishes that stretched a small amount of protein across a quart of water and whatever was in the vegetable bin. The oleomargarine finish points to the long stretch, from the late nineteenth century onward, when margarine was the everyday household fat and butter the occasional one.