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Clam Soup
Mrs. A. A. Carpenter.
Cut salt pork in very small squares and fry light brown; add one large or two small onions cut very fine, and cook about ten minutes; add two quarts of water and one quart of clams. Mix one tablespoon of flour with water, put it with one pint of milk and pour into the soup and let it boil about five minutes. Butter, pepper, salt, Worcestershire sauce to taste.
A contributed chowder in all but name — no potatoes, no crackers, just pork, onion, clams and a thin milk binding. Two details decide whether it comes out well: how long the clams cook and how the milk goes in.
- The clams"One quart of clams" means shucked clams with their liquor, as sold by the measure. Depending on size that is somewhere around a pound and a half of meat, the yield of several dozen hardshells. Canned whole clams with their juice, about 30 oz in total, are the practical modern substitute.
- Don't boil the clams five minutesThe instruction to boil after adding the milk assumes the clams are already in the pot; five minutes of hard boiling turns them to erasers. Add shucked clams in the last minute or two, off a hard boil, and chop any large ones first.
- Strain the liquorClam liquor carries sand. Let it settle and pour it off the grit, or strain through a coffee filter, before it goes into the two quarts of water.
- Salt porkThe recipe gives no quantity; about 4 oz, diced small, is enough. Render slowly so the fat comes out before the cubes brown, and hold back on added salt until the end, since modern salt pork can be very salty.
- The flour slurryOne tablespoon of flour in two and a half quarts of liquid gives barely any body — this is a soup, not a chowder. Whisk the flour into cold water until smooth, then into the cold milk, or it will lump on contact with the hot pot.
- Milk and curdlingWhole milk held at a rolling boil with salt pork and clam liquor will separate. Bring it to a bare simmer only, and keep the pot below boiling once the milk is in.
- WorcestershireA period seasoning that reads as unusual in a clam soup now, though it appears often enough in American cookbooks of the period. A teaspoon is plenty for the full quantity; it browns the color noticeably if you go further.
- YieldAbout two and a half quarts, serving six to eight as a first course.
The Home Cook Book (Chicago, 1876) was assembled from recipes donated by named local women and sold for charity — the format that dominated American community cookbooks for the next fifty years, and the reason so many entries here read like notes passed between neighbors rather than tested instructions. Mrs. Carpenter's soup sits in the long family of pork-and-onion clam preparations that runs from New England chowder outward; what separates a "clam soup" from a chowder in these books is mostly the absence of potato and biscuit, and the thin flour binding rather than a thick one. That a Chicago household was cooking clams at all in 1876 is usually explained by rail freight: shucked clams and shellfish packed in ice, and increasingly in tins, are thought to have reached inland cities that would have known them only by reputation a generation earlier. The Worcestershire is a period marker too — the sauce had been in wide American use for about thirty years by the time this book appeared, and cooks seem often to have reached for it in fish and shellfish dishes.