Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Clam Chowder
Clam Chowder
Fry six slices of crisp, fat pork, after which chop them to pieces, and sprinkle them in the bottom of a pot; lay over a layer of clams, adding a little cayenne or black pepper and salt, and sprinkle on a few small lumps of butter, then place a layer of chopped onions, and another of small crackers, split and moistened with some warm milk. Over this preparation pour a little of the fat left in the pan in which the pork has been fried; then repeat the layers of pork, clams, and onions, until the pot is filled, or nearly so, then cover with water and stew slowly, keeping the pot closely covered the while, for three-quarters of an hour, then drain off all the liquor that will come off readily, turn the chowder into a tureen, and return the gravy to the pot. Thicken the gravy with some flour or pounded crackers, add a glass of wine, some catsup and a little spiced sauce, let it boil up and pour it over the contents in the tureen. Either walnut or butternut pickles may be served with it.
A layered, water-based chowder of the old school, closer to a shore-dinner pot than to the creamy New England style. The original gives no quantities at all, so the notes below fill in workable amounts and flag the one timing that will ruin it.
- The hinge: clams and long stewingThree-quarters of an hour turns clams to erasers. Build and simmer the pork, onion, cracker and potato-free layers as written, then add the shucked clams in the last five minutes, or ladle the finished hot gravy over raw chopped clams in the tureen and let them cook through in the heat.
- Quantities, since none are givenFor six servings figure about 4 dozen hard-shell clams (quahogs or cherrystones), shucked and chopped, with all their liquor saved; 6 oz salt pork; 2 large onions; and 8 to 10 crackers. Use the reserved clam liquor as part of the "water" that covers the pot.
- "Fat pork"Salt pork, not fresh pork belly or bacon. If the only salt pork available is very heavily cured, blanch the dice a minute before frying, and hold back on the added salt until you taste the finished gravy.
- "Small crackers"New England common crackers — hard, unsalted, split in half like a biscuit. Unsalted hard water crackers work; oyster crackers are the nearest supermarket stand-in. They are both the thickener and the body of the dish, so soaking them in warm milk as directed matters.
- Catsup and "spiced sauce"In 1896 "catsup" could still mean mushroom or walnut ketchup — thin, dark and salty rather than sweet — though bottled tomato ketchup was by then also common in America. A tablespoon of mushroom ketchup or Worcestershire gives one plausible reading of the intended effect; modern tomato ketchup will make the chowder taste of sugar. "Spiced sauce" is not identified in the recipe; it most likely means some dark, vinegary bottled condiment.
- "A glass of wine"Period shorthand for roughly a wineglass, about 1/4 to 1/3 cup. Dry sherry or Madeira suits the dish; add it with the thickening so it has a minute to boil off its edge.
- Thickening the gravyFor the drained liquor from a pot this size, 2 tablespoons flour worked into a little of the pork fat, or a handful of crackers crushed fine, is enough. Pounded crackers give the softer, slightly grainy texture the recipe expects.
- Walnut and butternut picklesWalnut pickles are green, unripe walnuts in spiced vinegar — still sold in Britain, rare in the United States; butternuts are a separate North American nut, pickled young in the same way. Cornichons or pickled green tomatoes serve the same purpose: something sharp against the salt pork.
- Heat and vesselA heavy lidded pot over low heat, kept sealed as the recipe directs. "Stew slowly" means a bare tremble, not a rolling boil, or the cracker layers break down and the layered structure collapses into paste.
Oscar Tschirky's 1896 collection catches clam chowder at a moment when the layered, cracker-built pot chowder of the New England coast was still in the repertoire. The word chowder is generally traced to the French chaudière, the cauldron in which Breton and Channel fishermen cooked up a communal pot, carried to Newfoundland and down the New England shore; the layering method here — pork fat on the bottom, then clams, onions and split crackers repeated to the top — is recognisably a ship's or beach kitchen technique, where everything went in cold and came out an hour later. The finishing touches are pure late-Victorian hotel cooking, though: a glass of wine, bottled catsup, a "spiced sauce" and pickled walnuts alongside are the English condiment cupboard that American restaurant kitchens of the 1890s still leaned on for depth. That Oscar included so vernacular a dish at all says something about the Waldorf's clientele, who wanted terrapin and canvasback but also wanted chowder.