No. 300

Clam Chowder

Chowder de Lupines

Prepare a quarter of a pound of well chopped fat pork, a small bunch of parsley chopped not too fine, four ounces of chopped onions, one and a half quarts of potatoes cut in seven-sixteenth of an inch squares; two quarts of clams retaining all the juice possible; one quart of tomatoes peeled, pressed and cut in half inch squares. Put the fat pork into a saucepan, and when fried, add the onions to fry for one minute, then the potatoes, the clams and the tomatoes; should there not be sufficient moistening, pour in a little water and boil the whole until the potatoes are well done. Add five pilot crackers broken up into very small bits; one soup spoonful of thyme leaves, two ounces of butter, a very little pepper and salt to taste. This quantity will make four gallons, sufficient for sixty persons.

Another way.—Chop up a quarter of a pound of fat pork, melt it down, adding four ounces of onions cut in quarter inch dice, and fry them with the pork, without coloring, then add one and a half pounds of potatoes cut in half inch squares, a pound of peeled and halved tomatoes, pressed out and cut in five-eighth inch squares, one ounce of coarsely chopped parsley, seventy-five medium sized clams, removing the hard parts and chopping them up very fine, the clam juice, a little salt if found necessary, pepper and thyme leaves. Boil the whole till the potatoes are cooked (the green part of celery chopped fine) and should the clam juice not be sufficient, then add a little water.

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For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer gives two versions of the same tomato-based clam chowder, one scaled for a banquet and one for a household. Both are milkless, thickened only by potato starch and broken crackers.

The hinge: clam textureHard clams (quahogs) chopped fine will tolerate the twenty minutes the potatoes need, but they tighten badly past that point. If you use soft-shell clams or small littlenecks, steam them separately, chop, and stir them in with their strained liquor at the very end.
Fat porkMost likely salt pork, the fatty side pork sold in a slab. Blanch it briefly if it is very salty. The second version adds salt only "if found necessary" because the pork and the clam juice carry most of it; the first calls for "a very little pepper and salt to taste."
Pilot crackersHard, lightly salted ship's-biscuit-type crackers; common crackers are still made in New England, though the old Crown Pilot brand is gone. Oyster crackers or plain saltines broken small are the nearest supermarket equivalent; they dissolve and give the chowder its body. Note that crackers appear only in the first version.
"Pressed" tomatoesPeeled, squeezed to expel seeds and watery gel, then diced. About 1 lb of drained canned plum tomatoes stands in for the second version's fresh pound.
Clam quantitiesTwo quarts of clams "retaining all the juice possible" is meat plus liquor, so rather less than 4 lb of meat. Seventy-five "medium sized" clams in the smaller version could yield anywhere from about a quart upwards depending on size; buy by weight rather than count.
The fractional diceSeven-sixteenths and five-eighths of an inch are Ranhofer being Ranhofer. Half-inch potato and tomato dice is the practical reading; what matters is that the potato is uniform so it finishes at one time.
Spoon measuresA "soup spoonful" of thyme leaves is about a tablespoon of fresh leaves, or a scant teaspoon dried. The parenthetical chopped celery greens in the second version read as optional; the recipe inserts the phrase at the boiling stage without saying when to add them.
YieldThe four-gallon claim for the first version does not follow from the quantities listed, which come to only a little over a gallon before any water is added. The second version makes perhaps 3 quarts, or six good bowls.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer ran the kitchen at Delmonico's in New York for some three decades, in two spells, and The Epicurean (1894) is his working compendium, which is why one version here is portioned for sixty and the other for a family table. The odd title, "Chowder de Lupines," reflects the book's habit of dressing plain American dishes in half-French; the dish itself is the tomato-and-pork clam chowder of the New York and New Jersey shore, later nicknamed Manhattan clam chowder, a term that does not appear until the twentieth century. Its lineage is generally traced to the fish chowders of coastal New England, where salt pork, ship's biscuit and layered potatoes were the usual elements and milk or cream came later; the substitution of tomatoes is often credited to Portuguese and Italian fishing communities on the mid-Atlantic coast, though the documentary trail is thin. In Ranhofer's first version the crackers are still doing the thickening, as they had in earlier chowders, though the shipboard origin story is tradition rather than documented fact.