Clam Chowder
50 clams
½ teaspoon thyme
4 ounces salt pork
3 potatoes
1 medium-sized onion
1 pint milk
2 tablespoons flour
½ teaspoon pepper
½ teaspoon salt
3 pilot biscuits
Put clams, with their own liquor, into a granite-ware saucepan, and when they have come to a boil skim out the clams and return liquid to the fire. Cut the salt pork into thin slices, chop the onion, and sauté the two together until brown. Stir in flour, and when mixture is bubbling slowly, add the clam liquor. Season with salt, white pepper, and thyme. Add potatoes which have been cut into small cubes, and cook this mixture until the potatoes are tender. Just before serving, add milk, clams cut into pieces, and three large pilot biscuit or a larger number of hard water-crackers, as preferred. If liked thicker, blend one tablespoon of butter or other fat with the same of flour, and add gradually.
To make Rhode Island clam chowder, add tomatoes, either canned or fresh.
A straightforward New England chowder, with one hinge: the clams go in at the very end and are only warmed through. Everything else is timing and salt management.
- The clams themselvesFifty clams means hard-shell quahogs or large littlenecks, opened raw and their liquor saved, or steamed just until they gape. That is perhaps 3 to 4 cups of shucked meat if they are large quahogs, considerably less from littlenecks. Canned chopped clams with their juice will stand in, in which case skip the first boil entirely.
- Do not cook the clams twiceThe recipe skims them out for a reason. Clam muscle tightens into rubber within a couple of minutes of simmering, so cut them up and add them with the milk only long enough to heat through, off a hard boil.
- Strain the liquorClam liquor carries sand. Pour it through a fine sieve or a coffee filter after the first boil and leave the last spoonful behind in the pan.
- Granite-wareEnamelled steel, chosen because it does not react with brine or acid. Any enamelled or stainless pot does the same job; bare cast iron will give the chowder a metallic edge, and more so if you add tomatoes.
- Pilot biscuitA hard, only lightly salted ship's cracker, still sold as pilot bread in a few places. Broken oyster crackers, saltines or plain hardtack all work; they are there to thicken and to soak, so add them at table if you want them to stay crisp.
- SaltThe half teaspoon of salt is written for pork and clam liquor of unknown saltiness. Render the pork, add the liquor, then taste before adding any salt at all.
- MilkA pint of whole milk, added at the end and not boiled; between the salt and prolonged heat it can break if held at a rolling boil. Heat it separately or lower the flame before it goes in.
- YieldFour generous bowls, or six as a first course. The potatoes should be waxy or all-purpose; a floury baking potato will disintegrate into the broth.
- The tomato variantThe book just says to add tomatoes, though tomato and milk together risk splitting; if you want to avoid that, use about a cup of chopped canned tomatoes with their juice in place of the pint of milk.
Clam chowder in this form — salt pork, onion, potato, ship's biscuit, clam liquor — is the New England coastal version, and the pilot biscuit is the oldest thing in it: before potatoes became standard, layers of hard cracker were what gave chowder its body. The book's closing line is a small period curiosity. Tomato chowder is now almost always called Manhattan style, but early twentieth-century cookbooks were still unsettled on the label, and this one hangs it on Rhode Island; Rhode Island's own claim today is usually to a clear, milkless broth. The Butterick books were published by a pattern company, and the register throughout is domestic and practical: exact ingredient lists, a substitution offered for the cracker, and a one-sentence variation so a single recipe covers two dishes.