Corn Chowder
Cut into small pieces a little fat salt pork and try it out. In this cook a sliced onion. Strain the fat into another receptacle and put into the fat so strained, enough sliced boiled potatoes to fill three cups. Add two and one-half cups of boiling water, one can of corn and four cups of hot milk. Season with salt and white pepper, bring to the boiling point, and serve with a moistened cracker on each soup plate.
A New England chowder built on rendered salt pork fat rather than butter, with canned corn standing in for fresh. The method is sound; the vocabulary and one or two proportions need translating.
- "Try it out"This simply means render the diced salt pork slowly over moderate heat until the fat runs and the scraps brown. Keep the heat low so the fat stays clean-tasting and the bits crisp rather than scorch.
- Straining the fatThe instruction discards the pork scraps and onion along with the strainer's contents, which is a real loss. Cooks who prefer not to waste them can leave the softened onion in and scatter the crisp pork over the finished bowls.
- Salt porkFat salt pork is still sold, often as "salt pork belly" near the bacon. Thick-cut unsmoked bacon or pancetta is the closest substitute, though both bring flavours the original did not have. Rinse very salty pork before dicing.
- A can of cornCans of the period varied, but a modern 15-oz can, drained, is in the right range. Around two cups of fresh kernels or frozen corn will also serve.
- Boiled potatoesThree cups of sliced cooked potato is about 1 to 1 1/4 lb raw. A waxy variety holds its slices; a floury one will break down and thicken the chowder, which is not unwelcome.
- Do not let it boil hard"Bring to the boiling point" means just to the first shiver. Four cups of milk held at a rolling boil will curdle and catch on the bottom, and the corn turns starchy. Heat the milk separately, as directed, and combine off a fierce flame.
- White pepperSpecified so no black flecks show in a pale soup. Black pepper will do if that does not trouble you, though white pepper has its own earthier flavour and the two are not identical.
- The moistened crackerA hard common cracker or pilot biscuit, split and soaked briefly in milk or hot water so it softens without dissolving. Oyster crackers or split saltines are the usual modern stand-in.
- YieldRoughly three quarts, serving six as a first course or four as a supper.
Chowder came to New England by way of the Atlantic fishing trade, and the name is generally traced to the French chaudière, the cauldron in which a shore-side catch was cooked with pork and biscuit. The layered pattern here is the old one: rendered pork fat, onion, potato, liquid, and hard bread to thicken the bowl. Corn chowder is the landlocked cousin, made when fish was not to hand, and it became a staple of the American home table once cheap canned corn was widely available in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. The Butterick company, better known for dress patterns, published its cook book for the same middle-class household its magazines addressed, and the confident call for "one can of corn" says a good deal about how ordinary tinned goods had become by 1911.