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Catfish Chowder
Wash the fish in warm water, then place it on the fire in just enough water to cover it, and boil until tender, or until the bones will slip out. Take out the largest bones, chop up the fish, put it into a stewpan with about a pint of water, a large piece of butter, one breakfast cupful of cream, a small quantity of pepper and salt, one small onion, one teaspoonful of mustard, and one-half teacupful of walnut catsup, and stew the mixture until quite thick. Garnish with sliced lemons, and serve hot.
A brothless, cream-thickened chowder that reads more like an English fish stew than a New England one. The recipe assumes you know how much fish you started with, so scale from about 2 lb of whole catfish or 1 lb of fillet.
- Bone the fish firstThe whole point of the initial poach is that the flesh loosens from the frame. Let it cool enough to handle and pick it over carefully by hand, since "take out the largest bones" leaves the smaller ones behind. Fillets will save you the step entirely, though the poaching liquid is worth keeping either way.
- Walnut catsupA dark, salty condiment of green walnuts, vinegar, anchovy and spice, common in nineteenth-century larders and rarely stocked now. Worcestershire sauce is the closest supermarket relative; use about half the volume called for and taste, since it is sharper and saltier.
- Cup measuresA breakfast cupful is usually reckoned at 8 to 10 fl oz — a standard cup of cream will do. A teacupful is smaller, variously given as 4 to 6 fl oz, so half a teacupful of catsup falls somewhere between a quarter cup and a generous third. That is a great deal of a strong condiment; add it in stages.
- "A large piece of butter"Read as 2 to 3 tablespoons. It is there for richness rather than as a roux, so there is no flour in this chowder at all.
- The mustardA teaspoonful of mustard in this period most likely means dry mustard powder. Prepared jarred mustard will work but brings vinegar with it, which fights the walnut catsup.
- Cook the onionThe recipe does not say how the onion is prepared. Mince it and soften it in the butter before the fish goes in, or it will still be raw and assertive when the stew has thickened.
- ThickeningReduction is the only thickener here, so keep the pan at a bare simmer once the cream is in — a hard boil will break it and toughen the fish. The recipe gives no time; cook gently until quite thick.
- YieldFrom 2 lb of whole fish this makes four modest bowls. The lemon garnish is not decorative filler; the acid is needed against all that cream and butter.
Chowder in American cookery started as a coastal, cod-and-salt-pork affair, but the form travelled inland along the rivers, and catfish — abundant, cheap and easily caught from the Mississippi and Ohio systems — is often said to have become the usual freshwater substitute. This version has an Anglo-hotel accent: cream rather than milk, dry mustard, and walnut catsup, a condiment that had been a fixture of English kitchens since the eighteenth century and that survived in professional larders long after home cooks stopped bottling green walnuts each summer, though none of these ingredients is by itself distinctive enough to fix the dish's origin. Oscar's 1896 book collects recipes gathered across a career in New York hotel dining rooms, and a good many entries like this one preserve older domestic formulas alongside the à la carte grand-hotel repertoire he is better remembered for.