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Fish Chowder
Have three quarts water in a saucepan on the fire. Add one sliced carrot, one sliced onion, one sliced leek, one branch chopped celery; two branches parsley, chopped up; half clove sliced garlic, one saltspoon thyme, half sprig bay leaf, two cloves, one tablespoon salt, half teaspoon white pepper. Cover the pan and boil gently for thirty minutes. Add fish heads, spines or any parings at hand, cover and cook slowly for thirty minutes more. Chop one sound onion very fine, also two leeks, adding one ounce lean salt pork, finely chopped. Place in a saucepan with half ounce butter and let get a nice light brown colour, mixing constantly with the wooden spoon. Strain the fish broth into this pan, stir well, and as soon as it boils add flour medium-sized raw potatoes, peeled and cut into small dice. Cover the pan and boil for twenty minutes, add one saltspoon thyme and one pound fresh codfish, cut into very small dice. Boil five minutes. Dilute two ounces flour in three-quarters of a pint fresh milk and add to the broth, briskly stirring while adding it. Season again with half teaspoon salt and a saltspoon white pepper. Boil slowly for five minutes, pour into a soup tureen, sprinkle with a little chopped parsley and serve.
A two-stage chowder: a full court-bouillon built from fish frames first, then the chowder proper. Nothing here is difficult, but the ingredient list has one obvious typesetting error and several old measures.
- "Flour medium-sized raw potatoes"A misprint for four medium potatoes. The flour comes later, two ounces of it, whisked into the milk at the end.
- SaltspoonA quarter teaspoon. The recipe calls for three of them in all, two of thyme and one of white pepper, so about three-quarters of a teaspoon between them.
- Fish paringsHeads, frames and skin from any white fish, gills removed and the frames rinsed of blood, or the broth turns bitter and cloudy. Ask a fish counter for cod or haddock frames; a pound or two is right for three quarts of water.
- Don't overcook the brothThirty minutes on the vegetables is fine. Fish bones are usually reckoned to need only twenty to thirty minutes, and long simmering is commonly said to make the stock heavy. Strain rather than press the solids.
- Salt porkAn ounce of lean salt pork, finely chopped, is the flavour base. Unsmoked pork belly or a thick slice of unsmoked bacon works; blanch smoked bacon briefly if that is all you have, since smoke was not intended here.
- The cod goes in last for a reasonFive minutes in simmering broth is enough for quarter-inch dice of cod. Longer and it shreds into fibres and disappears into the soup. Cut it while the potatoes cook and keep it cold until the moment.
- The milk and flour finishThree-quarters of a pint is about a cup and a half; whisk the two ounces of flour (roughly a scant half cup) into cold milk until smooth before it goes near the pot, then stir constantly. After the milk is in, hold the pot at a bare simmer -- a hard boil with fish and milk together curdles and scorches on the bottom.
- YieldThree quarts of water makes a generous eight to ten servings. Reheat gently; the potatoes can go grainy.
Chowder is generally traced to the fishing communities of the North Atlantic, with the name usually derived from the French chaudière, the cauldron in which a ship's or shore-side communal fish stew was cooked, though the etymology is traditional rather than settled. What is striking about this version is how French it is: a properly aromatic court-bouillon with leek, bay, cloves and garlic, strained and then rebuilt over browned salt pork. That fits the professional restaurant idiom, in which hotel cooking in Britain and America was largely trained in the French manner. The plain New England chowder is far barer: pork, onion, potato, fish, milk, ship's biscuit. Here a cook who thinks in stocks has got hold of it, and the fish frames become the foundation of the whole soup.