Oyster Chowder
One quart of oysters; six potatoes; one and one-half pint of milk; three pilot biscuits; one tablespoon of flour; one tablespoon of butter; one onion; salt and pepper to taste. Drain the oysters, and run each through the fingers to remove any particles of shell. Strain the liquor through a fine wire sieve. Thinly slice the potatoes and onion, and boil them in the oyster liquor until tender. Wet the flour in a little of the milk, and stir it into the scalding milk adding also the butter, salt and pepper. Cook about one minute, put in the oysters and boil two minutes. Then turn into the milk the potatoes and onion, and the liquor in which they have been boiled. Place the pilot biscuits in the tureen. Pour the chowder over them.
COLD FRUIT PURÉES-In hot weather cold fruit purées are sometimes preferred to hot soups. They are always served in cups, usually of glass-and with a few pieces of the fruit floating on the surface.
SWEDISH STRAWBERRY PURÉE-This is really more like a sherbet, and is more refreshing than hot soup. Hull one quart of strawberries, setting aside one cup of the finest ones. Sprinkle the rest with two cups of sugar and add a cup of water and the juice of a lemon. Mash fine and let stand for two hours. Rub through a fine sieve and add a quart of Rhine wine. Set on the ice for three hours, or till ready to serve. Add the whole berries and serve in sherbet glasses.
RASPBERRY PURÉE-Boil in six cups of water one-half cup of sago and one-half cup of currant juice. When the sago is transparent, add two cups of raspberries and sugar to taste. Set aside to cool. Serve in sherbet glasses with cracked ice.
COLD CHERRY PURÉE-Heat the juice from a quart of canned, tart cherries. Add two level tablespoons of arrowroot moistened with cold water, stirring the mixture rapidly to prevent the forming of lumps. Flavor with the grated rind of a lemon. Place on ice and serve very cold with a whole cherry floating on each portion. ORANGE PURÉE-Place in an agateware kettle two cups of orange juice, and, when it is thoroughly heated, add one teaspoon of cornstarch dissolved in a little cold water. Cook slowly until clear. Add one-half cup sugar and a tablespoon of good sherry or brandy. Place on ice until needed and serve ice cold in glass sherbet cups.
A plain New England-style chowder built on the oyster liquor rather than stock. The page also carries four cold fruit purées that follow it in the book's soup chapter; notes on those are included at the end.
- Do not let the milk boil hardThe instruction to "boil two minutes" with the oysters in it is the one place this goes wrong. Hold the milk at a bare simmer: oyster liquor is acidic and salty, and a rolling boil in scalded milk will both curdle it and shrink the oysters to erasers. Two minutes at a scald is enough — the oysters are done the moment their edges ruffle.
- Pilot biscuitsHard ship's biscuit, only lightly salted and unsweetened; commercial pilot crackers were sold in New England well into the 20th century, Nabisco's Crown Pilot among them. Common saltines or unsalted water crackers stand in; roughly 10-12 saltines for three pilot biscuits, and put them in the tureen dry as directed so they soften in the hot chowder rather than dissolving in the pot.
- A quart of oystersThat means shucked oysters with their liquor, roughly 2 lb or 30-40 medium shucked oysters — two 16 oz tubs from a fish counter. If your oysters come with little liquor, make up the shortfall with water or clam juice, since the potatoes are cooked in it.
- Straining and the fingersRunning each oyster through the fingers is still the right move for grit and shell fragments. Strain the liquor through a fine sieve lined with a coffee filter or muslin; wire alone lets the fine sand through, and sand in a milk chowder is unmistakable.
- PotatoesReckon about 1.5 lb for six potatoes, and use a waxy or all-purpose variety so the thin slices hold together. Boiled in oyster liquor they need 10-15 minutes.
- SeasoningSalt last. Oyster liquor is already saline and reducing it while the potatoes cook concentrates it further; taste after the potatoes and liquor go into the milk.
- YieldAbout 6 generous bowls, or 8 as a first course. It does not reheat well — the oysters toughen on the second pass.
- On the fruit puréesSago is a starch pearl from palm pith, sold in Asian groceries; small pearl tapioca behaves much the same. "Agateware" is enamelled metal, and an enamelled rather than bare pan suits acidic fruit. Rhine wine means a white wine from the Rhine, usually Riesling, and would not necessarily have been dry. The strawberry purée is uncooked and takes a full quart of wine; it is a chilled wine soup, not a course for children.
Chowder in the American Northeast began as a fisherman's dish of salt pork, ship's biscuit and whatever came up in the net, the biscuit acting as both thickener and ballast; the milk-based version with potatoes is the later, domestic form, and the Butterick book's habit of laying the pilot biscuits in the tureen and pouring over them preserves the older logic. Pilot bread was a commercial descendant of naval hardtack and stayed on grocery shelves in New England long after the sailing fleet was gone. Oysters were a cheap protein of the period — Atlantic coast beds were still highly productive in the early 1900s — which is why they turn up in soups, patties, stuffings and fritters throughout books of this decade. The cold fruit purées appended here reflect a fashion of the same years for chilled first courses in glass cups, a hot-weather alternative to the customary soup course.