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Corn Chowder
Scrape about one quart of raw sweet Indian corn from the cob, and place it in a saucepan with enough water to cover, boiling it for twenty minutes. Skim out the corn as it floats on the top; pare some potatoes, so that when cut into slices they will fill a pint measure, soak and put them into hot water to scald. Fry an onion together with a piece of salt pork of about two inches cube, and strain the fat into a saucepan with the corn water. Put in the potatoes, corn, one teaspoonful of salt, one of pepper, place the pan on the fire and let the liquor simmer for a quarter of an hour or until the corn and potatoes are tender. Put in one tablespoonful of butter one pint of potatoes, one pint of milk, and boil up again. It must be served hot with crisp crackers.
A straightforward New England chowder as served in the Waldorf's kitchen, but the text has a duplicated line and a few timings that belong to an era of tougher field corn.
- The repeated pint of potatoesPotatoes are called for twice — a pint sliced at the start, then "one pint of potatoes" again at the end. This looks like a printer's duplication, though the text gives no way to know what was intended. Use one pint of sliced potatoes total.
- Sweet Indian corn"Indian corn" here simply means maize, and "sweet" specifies the fresh eating variety rather than the field corn kept for meal. About four to six ears will scrape out to a quart. Off-season, a pound of frozen kernels works, though you lose the starchy milk from the cob.
- Boiling the corn twenty minutesNineteenth-century sweet corn was starchier and picked less fresh than what reaches a market now. Modern supersweet varieties are tender in three or four minutes; boil them twenty and they go leathery. Simmer briefly, and keep the cooking water — it carries most of the flavour.
- Scraping the cobScrape rather than cut. Slit the kernels down the middle with a knife tip, then press the back of the blade down the ear to force out the pulp and leave the tough hulls behind. That pulp is what thickens the chowder.
- The salt pork and onionA two-inch cube is roughly four ounces. Only the strained fat goes into the pot as written, but the crisped dice of pork and the onion are worth keeping back and scattering over each bowl rather than discarding.
- A teaspoon of pepperA full teaspoon in this quantity is aggressive by current taste. Start with a quarter teaspoon and correct at the end.
- Don't let the milk boil"Boil up again" after the milk goes in can curdle it against the salt and the potato starch. Bring it just to steaming and hold it there. The chowder is also better after twenty minutes off the heat.
- CrackersThe "crisp crackers" of the period were common or pilot crackers — hard, unsalted rounds split and either floated in the bowl or crumbled over. Oyster crackers are the closest widely available substitute.
- YieldServes four to six as a first course, three as a main with bread.
Chowder came up the Atlantic coast from the fishing communities of Nova Scotia and New England, where the word is generally traced to the French chaudière, the cauldron a crew cooked in, though a derivation from the English dialect jowter, a fish hawker, has also long been argued. The form was fixed by the salt pork, ship's biscuit and potatoes any coastal kitchen kept on hand; corn chowder is the inland, late-summer variant that drops the fish entirely and leans on the sweet corn glut of August and September. Its appearance in Oscar Tschirky's book is a reminder that the Waldorf, for all its French menu language, cooked a good deal of plain American food for guests who wanted it.