Fish Chowder
2 cups flaked cod, or. fresh cod. 1/4-inch slices. 1/8 teaspoon pepper. 1 pint boiling water 1 sliced onion Salt pork fat, 1 inch 1 tablespoon salt teaspoon pepper 1 quart milk 8 soda crackers 6 potatoes, cut into 1-inch slices by 3 inches Try out fat, add sliced onion and cook to a light brown, without burning. Strain fat into saucepan, add potatoes and boiling water and cook 10 minutes. Add the fish and simmer 20 minutes. Add the milk and seasonings. Heat to boiling point and serve with crackers, split and previously dipped in cold milk.
Fish, like meat, is a building food and contains some mineral matter. For variety it can be used in place of meat. At some seasons of the year fish from local waters can be bought very cheap.
Fish contains the same food value as meat at a much smaller cost, tastes good, and is easily digested.
As white-fleshed fish is considered more easily digested than the red-fleshed, it should be selected for invalids, convalescents or those suffering from weak digestion.
Select a fish that has bright eyes and gills, shiny scales, firm flesh, and is free from a disagreeable odor.
A plain New England chowder, printed with the fractions and the fish itself lost from the ingredient list. The method is sound; the quantities need reconstructing.
- The missing fishThe ingredient list gives no quantity, though the method calls for fish. A chowder on this scale — a quart of milk, six potatoes — wants about 2 lb of skinless white fish fillet, cut into large chunks. Cod, haddock or pollock is the traditional choice.
- Fractions dropped in printing"teaspoon pepper" has evidently lost a fraction in setting — a quarter or an eighth is the likeliest reading — and the potato line should read something like slices 1 inch by 3 inches. Read the quantities as approximate and season by taste.
- A tablespoon of salt is too muchWith rendered salt pork already in the pot and crackers on top, start with a teaspoon and adjust at the end. Salt pork varied enormously in cure.
- Salt pork fat, 1 inchA one-inch cube of salt pork, diced and rendered slowly until the fat runs and the scraps brown. If you cannot find salt pork, thick-cut unsmoked bacon is the nearest thing; smoked bacon changes the character of the soup.
- Try outTo try out is to render — melt the fat gently out of the meat over low heat rather than frying it hard. Burnt fat will carry through the whole pot, which is why the recipe warns against it.
- Do not boil after the milk goes in"Heat to boiling point" is the one instruction worth ignoring. Bring it just to a shiver; a rolling boil curdles the milk and shreds the fish, which is already cooked through by then.
- Twenty minutes on the fishThat is generous. Chunks of cod are done in eight to ten minutes at a bare simmer, and will simply fall apart if held longer. Add the fish once the potatoes are nearly tender.
- Soda crackersCommon crackers or plain soda crackers. Splitting them and dipping in cold milk softens them so they swell in the hot chowder instead of dissolving to paste; earlier chowders were commonly built in layers over ship's biscuit.
- YieldAbout six generous bowls. It reheats well the next day, again without boiling.
Chowder is generally traced to the French chaudière, the cauldron in which fishing communities cooked the day's catch, and by the nineteenth century it was thoroughly naturalised along the New England coast: salt pork, onion, potato, ship's biscuit and whatever came off the boat. The milk-enriched version here is the later, more domestic form. What is striking is everything after the method — the note that fish is a "building food", cheap in season, and easy on weak digestion. That suggests a public-health message carried alongside the cooking, promoting inexpensive protein and, in the closing lines on bright eyes and clean smell, showing shoppers how to tell fresh fish from old at a time when few households had reliable refrigeration.