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Clam Chowder
Chop very fine two medium white onions, two branches soup celery, two leeks, one ounce lean salt pork. Heat up in a saucepan one tablespoon butter; add all the above ingredients and stir well with a wooden spoon while gently cooking for ten minutes. Pour in two and a half quarts hot water or broth. Boil for sixteen minutes. Peel and cut into small, dice-shaped pieces three good-sized, sound raw potatoes; wash and drain well, then add to the soup. Boil for six minutes. Chop very finely and add to the soup eight large, fresh clams, saving the liquor. Cut into small pieces three good-sized peeled red tomatoes and add to the soup; also two tablespoons Worcestershire sauce, six drops tabasco sauce, two saltspoons thyme, one teaspoon salt, a saltspoon pepper; pour in the liquor of the clams; mix well with a wooden spoon. Briskly boil for thirty minutes. Add six crushed soda crackers and a teaspoon finely chopped parsley. Mix lightly. Boil for ten minutes more. Pour into a soup tureen and send to the table.
A tomato-based chowder of the Manhattan type, written for a hotel kitchen where the pot could be left at a hard boil unattended. The measurements translate easily; the timings do not.
- The hinge: the clamsChopped clams boiled for forty minutes, as written, turn to rubber. Add them in the last two or three minutes of cooking, keeping the soup at a simmer so they are cooked through.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. So two saltspoons thyme is half a teaspoon dried, and a saltspoon pepper is a quarter teaspoon.
- Soup celery and leeks"Soup celery" most likely means the coarse outer stalks and leafy tops rather than the pale heart, though the term was also used for leafy soup celery sold as such; two branches is two ribs with their leaves. Use only the white and pale green of the leeks, split and washed carefully.
- Clam quantityEight large clams meant quahogs or large chowder clams. If you are buying shucked clams, roughly a cup of chopped meat plus their liquor is the equivalent; canned chopped clams with juice work as well.
- Salt porkOne ounce of lean salt pork is a thin slice, diced. Thick-cut bacon substitutes, though it brings smoke the original did not have; rinse the salt pork if it is very heavily cured, and hold back some of the added salt.
- PotatoesSix minutes at a boil will not cook diced potatoes through, but the long simmer that follows will. Cut them no larger than half an inch and expect the edges to soften and thicken the broth, which is the intention.
- Crackers as thickenerSix crushed soda crackers are there to body the soup, not to garnish it. Plain unsalted saltines are the closest modern match; crush them fine and stir in near the end, giving them a few minutes to dissolve.
- Heat level"Briskly boil" is stronger than the soup needs. A steady simmer gives the same reduction without breaking the potatoes down entirely.
- YieldTwo and a half quarts of liquid plus solids makes about eight generous bowls. It reheats well, but reheat gently for the clams' sake.
Alexander Filippini, long the chef at Delmonico's in New York, was writing at a moment when two chowders were competing for the name. The older New England style bound clams and potatoes with milk or salt pork fat; the tomato-based version, associated with New York and later nicknamed Manhattan clam chowder, is generally traced to the city's Italian and Portuguese immigrant cooks, though the label itself appears in print only later. Filippini gives no name for the style at all, which suggests the tomato version was simply chowder as he knew it. The Worcestershire, tabasco and soda crackers are marks of an American professional kitchen of the period: bottled sauces were cheap, reliable and used freely, and cracker crumbs served as a thickener.