Home › A Calendar of Dinners › August 30
August 30
Menu: Clam Chowder; Stuffed Tomato Salad Welsh Rarebit; Lemon. Pie Coffee Clam Chowder-Remove heads from 4 cups clams and chop. Parboil 4 cups potatoes. Cook 1 chopped onion and 1/2 cup salt pork cut in cubes 15 minutes. Arrange clams, potatoes, onion and pork in layers in saucepan; cover with 3 cups boiling water, and simmer till tender. Blend 3 tablespoons Crisco with 2 tablespoons flour, add 4 cups scalded milk and stir till boiling; add clam mixture, seasonings to taste, 1 dash of Tabasco sauce, and serve hot.
A New England-style chowder printed as one run-on paragraph in a day's menu, with the shortening standing in for the butter a cook of the period would otherwise have used. The order of operations matters more than the punctuation suggests.
- "Remove heads from clams"This most likely points to soft-shell (steamer) clams, whose dark siphon skin and tough neck were commonly trimmed off before chopping. With shucked quahogs or littlenecks there is nothing to remove; simply chop the tough adductor and body, keeping the soft bellies whole.
- How many clamsFour cups of shucked clams is roughly 2 lb of meat, which takes something like 8 quarts of steamers or five to six dozen littlenecks in the shell. Buying shucked clams by the pint is far simpler.
- Save the liquorThe recipe covers everything with plain boiling water and says nothing about the clam liquor. Strain it through a cloth to catch grit and use it as part of the three cups; it carries most of the flavor.
- Simmering the clamsChopped clams need only a few minutes. Simmering them with the potatoes "till tender" will toughen them, so cook the potatoes and pork first and add the clams near the end.
- Crisco and the porkCrisco is hydrogenated vegetable shortening, then new on the market. Butter can stand in here in the roux, though it carries water and milk solids and is not a like-for-like swap by volume. The half cup of diced salt pork is rendered fat as much as it is meat; if it renders freely you will need less shortening.
- Scalded milkScalding means heating to just below a boil, around 180F, when small bubbles ring the pan. It was originally done to kill enzymes and bacteria in raw milk; with pasteurized milk it mainly keeps the chowder from cooling as the roux takes it up.
- Keeping it from curdlingOnce the milk base and the clam mixture are combined, hold the pot below a simmer. Boiling salted, slightly acidic clam broth into milk is the usual cause of a broken chowder.
- YieldRoughly four quarts, enough for eight generous bowls as a main course.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was Procter & Gamble's promotional cookbook for a product launched only two years earlier: cottonseed oil hardened by hydrogenation into a white, neutral, shelf-stable fat that could replace lard or butter in any position. The "Calendar of Dinners" section supplied a menu for every day of the year, which is why this chowder arrives wedged between a lemon pie and a Welsh rarebit under the heading for August 31 -- the book's argument being that Crisco belonged in every one of those dishes. Clam chowder itself is far older, an eighteenth-century coastal New England dish of layered salt pork, ship's biscuit or potato, and clams; the name is generally traced to the French chaudière, the cauldron such a stew was cooked in, though the derivation is traditional rather than settled. What is telling here is the milk-and-flour base and the dash of Tabasco: by 1913 the plain layered pot had become a creamed soup with a manufacturer's fat at its foundation.