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Oyster Chowder
Cut in small square pieces two leeks and two medium, white onions, place in a saucepan with two ounces salt pork cut in small squares, add one tablespoon melted butter, gently brown for six minutes, frequently stirring meanwhile. Pour in two quarts water and let boil for twenty minutes, cut three medium, peeled, raw potatoes into third-of-an-inch squares, add to the soup with three fresh, peeled, crushed, red tomatoes. Season with two teaspoons salt, two tablespoons Worcestershire sauce, two tablespoons tomato catsup, six drops tabasco and two saltspoons shredded dried thyme, mix well and slowly cook for forty-five minutes. Open thirty-six medium, fresh oysters. Cut them in four pieces each and add to the soup with their own liquor, then boil for ten minutes. Pour the chowder into a soup tureen, sprinkle half a teaspoon freshly chopped parsley over, place six broken soda crackers over the chowder and serve.
A tomato-based oyster chowder from the era when oysters were cheap enough to use three dozen in a pot of soup. The only real trap is the cooking time given for the oysters.
- The oystersTen minutes of boiling will shrink the oysters into rubber. Add them, cut up, with their liquor at the very end, and let the chowder come back to a bare simmer for two to three minutes — just until the edges ruffle — then take it off the heat.
- Buying the oystersThirty-six medium oysters is roughly a quart of shucked oysters with their liquor, which is what to ask for at a fish counter rather than shucking three dozen yourself. Keep every drop of the liquor; it carries most of the flavor of the finished soup.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so two of them make half a teaspoon of dried thyme. Crumble it between your fingers as you add it.
- Salt porkTwo ounces of salt pork, diced small, is the fat and the backbone here. Thick-cut unsmoked bacon is the closest easy substitute; smoked bacon will read as a different soup. Render it slowly before the vegetables go in, and hold back on the two teaspoons of salt until you taste at the end.
- The tomatoesThree medium tomatoes, peeled and crushed, is about a pound. Out of season, roughly two cups of canned crushed tomatoes with their juice does the work better than pale fresh ones.
- Liquid and bodyTwo quarts of water for this quantity of solids gives a thin, brothy chowder in the tomato style, not a thick one. The forty-five minutes of slow cooking with the potatoes is what reduces and lightly thickens it — leave the lid off or ajar so it can.
- SeasoningTwo tablespoons of Worcestershire, two of catsup and six drops of Tabasco add up to a sharper, sweeter broth than most modern chowders. Add half, then adjust at the end; commercial catsup is generally sweeter now than the sharper, more vinegary bottled versions of the period.
- Crackers and yieldThe broken soda crackers are plain saltines, scattered over the tureen at the last moment so they soften but do not dissolve. The pot serves six generously as a first course, four as a meal.
Chowder in nineteenth-century America split along a line still argued over: milk-and-cracker chowders in New England, and tomato-based ones associated with New York, later nicknamed Manhattan style. This one sits firmly in the tomato camp, and its Worcestershire, catsup and Tabasco suggest a restaurant cook's version rather than a fisherman's — bottled sauces of this sort were readily to hand in professional kitchens of the period. Oysters were then a cheap urban staple, dredged in enormous quantities from the Chesapeake and the beds around New York, sold from street stands and cellars by the plate; a recipe calling for three dozen in a single soup pot assumed a price no modern cook enjoys. The instruction to open the oysters yourself is a reminder that they arrived live and in the shell, and that the liquor released in shucking was understood to be part of the recipe, not waste.