[Sca-cooks] chowder

[Philip & Susan Troy]

Also sprach Erika Thomenius:
>>Manhattan chowder, which is really Montauk Point Chowder, which is in
>>turn a variant of Block Island (which is in Rhode Island, which in
>>turn is in New England) -- look at a map and see how close Block
>>Island is to Orient Point, on the tip of Long Island) is made from
>>fish or clams and has tomatoes added near the end of the cooking
>>process instead of butter or cream.
>
>Which is an Abomination Before the Lord.  :)
>
>-Gytha "chowder purist" Karlsdotter
>
>"Say it!  Say it!  CHOW-DAH!"

See, that's exactly my point. Universal chowder orthodoxy does not
exist, and chowder in its myriad "impure" forms is as old and as
well-respected on a regional level as it is in its "pure" form.
Chowder in its [current] [alleged] "pure" form (involving milk and/or
cream, often with a thickening of flour in one form or another)  has,
essentially, no historical basis, or at least no upheld ancient
traditional basis, and therefore no legitimate claim to purity. It is
very probably a 20th-century invention. The addition of tomatoes to
chowder, as far as I or anyone I've met or read, can determine, was
originally the act of New England cooks, going about as far back as
the earliest written chowder recipes.

One might make the claim that a tomato-free chowder is a Northern New
England thing, simply on the basis that Maine was originally not
known as a tomato-growing center of the world, but then neither is
Massachusetts, and Lydia Child was writing in Boston (she's not the
only New England writer to espouse the tomato cause, BTW), and one of
the tomato products she recommends is a preserve probably bearing
fairly little resemblance to modern ketchup. It is presumably not a
huge amount more difficult to get canned tomatoes or ketchup (no, I
am not and would not advocate bottled Heinz ketchup in chowder) in
19th century Portland than to get them in 19th-century Boston.

It's fine and cool to simply not like tomatoes in chowder, but to
claim some kind of historical orthodoxy as the reason for not liking
them, instead of simply not liking them, appears to be unfounded.
What I find truly unfortunate are the number of people whose only
exposure to a chowder with tomatoes has been in cans, who are
prepared to condemn the entire species on that basis, which is more
or less like condemning a perfect linguine puttanesca, untasted,
after trying Spaghetti-O's.

One of the things that brings a warm fuzzy to my heart is the fact
that, in the late 1980's, Brian Halloran, the executive chef at both
Locke-Ober's in Boston and the Clark-Cooke House in Newport, won
accolades for the best chowder in New England (from, I think, Yankee
Magazine?), and his secret recipe involved canned Doxie chowder with
added clams and a re-seasoning...

But how can you argue with such a fine, old, established New England
tradition as putting tomatoes in chowder? ;-)

Adamantius, who hates canned Manhattan Chowder, but likes home-made,
among several other kinds

--
"No one who cannot rejoice in the discovery of his own mistakes
deserves to be called a scholar."
	-DONALD FOSTER