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Clam Chowder
Chop fifty clams, peel and slice ten raw potatoes, cut into dice six onions and a half pound fat salt pork, slice six tomatoes (if canned use a coffee-cup full), add a pound pilot crackers; first put pork in bottom of pot and try out, partially cook onions in pork-fat, remove the mass from pot, and put on a plate bottom side up; make layers of the ingredients, season with pepper and salt, cover with water and boil an hour and a half, adding chopped parsley to taste.
A large tomato-based chowder in the pre-Manhattan style, built in layers rather than stirred. Two things in the original need attention: the clams are cooked far too long, and one line of the method has been garbled in printing.
- The clams come lastChopped clams cooked an hour and a half turn to rubber. Simmer the vegetables, pork and tomato until the potatoes are soft, then add the clams and their liquor and give them two to three minutes off the heat before serving.
- "Put on a plate bottom side up"The line is ambiguous as printed. It may be the old trick of setting an inverted heatproof plate in the bottom of the pot so the layered ingredients do not scorch, the pork and onions coming out while the plate goes in; it can equally be read as simply turning the cooked mass out onto a plate. If you take the inverted-plate reading, a heavy-bottomed pot makes it unnecessary.
- Try out the pork"Try out" means render slowly over low heat until the fat runs and the dice are golden. Half a pound of fat salt pork gives plenty of fat; keep it, since it is the only enrichment in the dish.
- Fifty clamsThese are most likely hard-shell clams — quahogs or chowder clams — which would yield roughly 3 to 4 cups of chopped meat and a good deal of liquor. Strain and use the liquor as part of the cooking water. That is on the order of one and a half to two pounds of shucked clams from a fish counter.
- Pilot crackersPilot bread was a hard ship's biscuit of the hardtack family, lightly salted or unsalted, which thickened chowder as it dissolved. A full pound will make this very thick; start with half that in coarsely broken saltines or oyster crackers and add more if you want it stiffer.
- A coffee-cup fullA nineteenth-century coffee-cup is generally reckoned at somewhere around a cup, so roughly 8 fl oz of canned tomato in place of the six fresh ones. A 14.5-ounce can is nearly twice that and will give a distinctly more tomato-forward result.
- SaltBetween the salt pork and the clam liquor the pot is already salty. Season with pepper at the layering stage and hold the salt until the end.
- YieldAs written this fills a large stockpot and would serve twelve or more as a main course. Halving everything is sensible for a household of four.
Chowder made with water rather than milk is the older American form, though the tomato is a later addition to it; salt pork, onions, potatoes, tomatoes and hard biscuit, layered and boiled, is close to what came in the twentieth century to be labelled Manhattan style, in contrast to the cream chowders of eastern Massachusetts and Maine. Pilot bread was a usual thickener before flour became common, and its slow dissolution is what gave old chowders their characteristic body. That a Southern compilation like The Dixie Cook Book carries a New England shellfish dish is typical of the late nineteenth-century household manual: publishers assembled these books from many regional sources, and a coastal chowder sat comfortably beside oysters and crab in the shell-fish chapter.