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Fish Chowder (Five pounds of any kind)
Five pounds of any kind of fish (the light salt water fish is the best), half pound of salt pork, two large onions, one quart of sliced potatoes, one quart of water, one pint of milk, two tablespoonfuls of flour, six crackers, salt and pepper. Skin the fish, and cut all the flesh from the bones. Put the bones on to cook in the quart of water, and simmer gently ten minutes; fry the pork, then add the onions; cut into slices, cover, and cook five minutes; then add the flour, and cook eight minutes longer, stirring often. Strain on this the water in which the fish bones were cooked and boil gently for five minutes; then strain all on the potatoes and fish. Season with salt and pepper, and simmer fifteen minutes. Add the milk and the crackers, which were first soaked for three minutes in the milk; let it boil up once, and serve.
A standard New England chowder built on a salt pork and flour base rather than the older layered, cracker-thickened method. The proportions are generous and the timings mostly sound; a few points need translating.
- How much fish you are buyingFive pounds is fish bought bone-in, since the bones go into the stock; whether the head came with it the recipe does not say. Expect somewhere around two to two and a half pounds of flesh. If you start with fillets, use about 2 lb and buy fish frames or heads separately for the broth.
- "Light salt water fish"Cod, haddock, hake, cusk or pollock — lean white ocean fish that flakes into firm pieces. Oily fish such as mackerel or bluefish will overwhelm the milk. Skip the bones of salmon or any strongly flavoured fish for the stock.
- The crackersThese are common crackers or pilot biscuit — hard, dry rounds that swell and thicken without dissolving. Ordinary soda crackers are a poor stand-in; unsalted oyster crackers or split, dried water biscuits come closer. Six of them broken up makes a cupful or more, though sizes varied.
- Volume measuresA quart of sliced potatoes is roughly 1½ lb of peeled potatoes; a quart of water is 4 cups, a pint of milk 2 cups. Half a pound of salt pork is a substantial amount of fat and salt — rinse it, or cut back to 4 oz, and taste before adding more salt.
- Season lastBetween the pork, the crackers and the fish, the pot arrives at the table well salted on its own. Hold back the salt until after the milk goes in and taste then.
- Don't boil after the milk"Let it boil up once" is the one place the recipe can go wrong. Bring it just to the point of steaming and shivering at the edge; a hard boil in a flour-thickened milk base will curdle it and toughen the fish.
- Fifteen minutes with the fishThat is long by present standards. The potatoes need it, but firm white fish is done in five to eight minutes. Give the potatoes a head start in the strained broth and add the fish for the last several minutes.
- YieldAround three quarts — eight to ten bowls. Chowder is generally reckoned better the next day, reheated gently and never boiled.
Chowder came into New England kitchens from the fishing coasts of the North Atlantic, and the name is usually traced to the French chaudière, the cauldron in which a shore crew cooked its share of the catch — a derivation often repeated and not firmly documented. The older eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century versions were layered in the pot: pork, fish, crackers, onions, repeated, with liquid poured over, and the hard bread did the thickening. This version has been reworked along the lines of a home-cooked soup, with the pork fat and flour cooked together into a roux, a proper stock drawn from the bones, and milk added at the end. Salt pork was long the customary fat in coastal kitchens, and the pint of milk points toward the pale, creamy chowder New Englanders now defend so fiercely against tomatoes.