Corn Chowder
4 potatoes cut in 1-inch slices 1 can corn 1 quart milk 8 crackers Salt and pepper Cut pork into small pieces and try it out in a pan over a slow fire. Add the sliced onion and cook 5 minutes without burning. Strain fat into a saucepan. Add potatoes and 2 cups boiling water to fat and cook until potatoes are soft. Then add the milk and corn. Heat to boiling point. Season with salt and pepper. Moisten crackers in cold milk. Serve crackers on top of chowder.
A standard New England milk chowder, printed here with a partially truncated ingredient list — the salt pork and onion appear only in the method, and the trailing line about cod belongs to a fish-chowder variation. Work from the instructions rather than the list.
- The missing ingredientsThe method calls for salt pork and a sliced onion that never made it into the list above; figure on 2-3 oz salt pork (or thick-cut bacon) and one medium onion. The stray final line means the same base can be made with 2 cups of flaked cooked or fresh cod in place of, or alongside, the corn.
- "Try it out"To try out pork is to render it slowly until the fat runs and the scraps brown. A slow fire means low heat; in practice that is usually eight to ten minutes. Rushing it scorches the fat and the whole chowder tastes burnt.
- Strain the fatThe recipe discards the browned pork and onion with the strainer. Returning the crisp pork bits and the softened onion to the pot is a fair improvement and costs nothing.
- The can of cornPeriod cans of corn were often the No. 2 size, around 20 oz, somewhat larger than today's standard 15-16 oz can; a modern can will do, or add a little extra corn. Whole-kernel corn packed in water is the closest match; if you use cream-style, expect a thicker, sweeter chowder and cut back on the milk slightly.
- Do not boil after the milk goes inThis is the hinge. "Heat to boiling point" means to the point of boiling and no further — milk chowder that actually boils will curdle and catch on the bottom. Bring it just to a shiver and hold it there.
- The crackersThese are common crackers or pilot biscuit — hard, unsalted, thick round crackers, still sold in New England. Saltines are the usual substitute, but soak them only briefly or they dissolve. Some cooks split and toast them instead.
- Potato thicknessOne-inch slices are large by modern taste and take 15-20 minutes to soften in the two cups of water. Half-inch dice cook faster and give a spoonable chowder.
- YieldFour to six servings as a main course, with the crackers.
Chowder in nineteenth-century America meant a layered pot built on rendered salt pork, potatoes and either fish or, later, corn, thickened with broken hard crackers rather than flour — the cracker was structural before it was a garnish. Corn chowder is the inland, cheaper cousin of the coastal fish chowder, and the way this entry trails off into "2 cups flaked cod, or fresh cod" shows how interchangeable the two were understood to be: same fat, same potatoes, same milk, swap the filling. The word itself is generally traced to the French chaudière, the cauldron a fishing crew cooked in, though the connection is traditional rather than firmly documented. A dish of this kind — cheap, filling, made from a can and a quart of milk — reads as everyday economy cooking rather than anything festive.