[Sca-cooks] chowder - OOP

[Philip & Susan Troy]

Also sprach Erika Thomenius:
>>>A counterchallenge, though, since your confidence level is so high.
>>>Find a modern chowder recipe, which produces the thick, smoothish
>>>(excepting clams or taters, that is), white milk and/or cream stuff
>>>that most people today associate with New England, that is older than
>>>1900. Do we have a deal?
>>>
>>>And the honor and glory, of course, lie in the attempt, so never fear
>>>on that score.
>
>(These are my preliminary findings, from the internet.  I have a
>6-month-old, so sometimes it is tricky to get to a library quickly.  I won't
>be able to go until this weekend, but here's what I've found so far.)
>
>In the 1896 Fannie Farmer cookbook, there is a clam chowder recipe that is
>precisely as you have said.  The Fannie Farmer cookbook was previously known
>as _The Boston Cookery School Cook Book_, published in 1883, but I wasn't
>able to find a copy to verify if the New England Clam Chowder was in that
>one, too.

I believe I actually have the 1883 Fannie Farmer, somewhere within
maybe three feet of me. I'll see if I can find it. Do you mean
actual, archaic cheowdah, i.e. fish or clams, ship's biscuit, salt
pork, and onion, or the newer canon of roux, cream or milk, taters,
onions, and clams? I can check, but I'm not certain which I'm
supposed to be looking for there...

>
>Now, I realize that, while you did say "pre-1900", 1896 doesn't really
>count, so I kept looking.

No, actually, 1896 is fine, because my parameters were specifically
stated for a reason. It is before 1900. Especially if it is a second
edition ;-).

>   As I suspect you knew I would, I did not find in
>any of the online 19th century cookbooks (and there are many) any recipes
>that came up with a milk or cream based clam chowder, and at least one that
>calls for the addition of ketchup.

As I said, Lydia Child's "American Frugal Housewife", which is
originally something like 1833, has ketchup as an optional and
recommended addition. Of course, this is Massachusetts, and just as
Floridians are sometimes apt to say Virginia isn't the real South, I
expect someone from Maine might argue that Massachusetts cheowdah
practices are of dubious orthodoxy.

>   However, I did find a lot of clam soup
>recipes that are VERY similar to New England Clam Chowder in _Common Sense
>in the Household_ (1874), _The National Cook-Book_ (1866), and this one from
>_Mrs. Goodfellow’s Cookery As It Should be_ (1865):
>
>
>Clams – Stewed p 128
>
>The small round, thin-edged clam is the best; it is called “Quahog”  The
>best way of preparing them is to was the clam carefully, then lay them in an
>iron pot and cover it, set it in an oven, and this saves the juice; when
>they are all opened, but not allowed to cook, put the juice into a saucepan
>– not the clams, stir in a large spoonful of butter and a spoonful of flour,
>chop some fresh parsley and add them; mix this well with the juice, and let
>it simmer for 5 minutes; then add a cup of cream, grated nutmeg, salt and a
>little pepper; let this simmer again, then add the clams, which like
>oysters, must not be much cooked as they harden by cooking.  Serve hot.
>
>
>Looks pretty familiar, but it's not called clam chowder.

It's also very possibly served on toast points, a little more like an
oyster pan roast. Not quite the same thing as chowder. And then, of
course, it violates the canon, albeit in a different way from
Manhattan Clam Chowder. I like the fact that quahogs are considered
small. I've watched what we, in my part of New York, would once have
called cherrystones get downgraded to littlenecks, and quahogs are
now cherrystones. What are now called quahogs are enormous and nearly
inedible, and what we once thought of as littlenecks are no longer
available locally, except for the reasonably close equivalent of the
little Manilla clams from the Asian markets.

>
>_Common Sense In the Household_ has a specific recipe for clam chowder,
>calling for salt pork and crackers soaked in milk, but it calls for the
>addition of catsup, wine and spiced sauce, whatever that is.
>
>In addition, there is a reference in _Moby Dick_ (1851):
>
>But when that smoking chowder came in, the mystery was delightfully
>explained.  Oh, sweet friends! hearken to me.  It was made of small juicy
>clams, scarcely bigger than hazel nuts, mixed with pounded ship biscuit, and
>salted pork cut up into little flakes; the whole enriched with butter, and
>plentifully seasoned with pepper and salt.
>
>
>
>Now, there's no cream, no potatoes, and the addition of salt pork (which
>this particular Chowder Purist is willing to accept as canon), but there are
>also no tomatoes.
>
>So what do you think?

Well, you see, I think we have the question of The Burden of Proof.
Not to be a hard-shell (yuk yuk) here, but part of my point was that
no New Yorker ever claims that _not_ adding tomatoes is a heresy;
it's New Englanders (or New-England-style partisans, regardless of
birthplace) who are generally claiming that _doing so_ is a heresy.
So finding a recipe that doesn't call for them may add some small
support to the idea, but doesn't really prove anything conclusive,
except that not everyone in NE uses tomatoes. Which we already knew.
However, some did, and it is my belief that what is now known as
Manhattan Clam Chowder is based on chowder recipes and traditions
originally from Rhode Island and Massachusetts. In short, a New
England invention that belies the idea of a strictly observed,
tomato-less, New England canon. It's probably basically the same deal
as there being some parts of France where they have cows and not
olives, so they cook with cream and butter, and other parts where
they have olives and goats, so they use goat cheese and olive oil.
The main difference is that _they_ don't get all het up over it, and
neither, as far as I can tell, do New Yorkers get all het up about
tomatoes in chowder.

I do think, though, that a tomato-laced (a term I prefer to
tomato-based, as they're all supposed to be fish and clam soups, not
milk or tomato-based) chowder suffers greatly from being processed
for canning: one thing I always am struck by in the presence of any
MCC that wasn't home-made was the hard, rubbery texture of the clams.
We've both commented on the acidity of the chowder, too, and I think
being overcooked, and then sitting in a can in an acid environment is
the death-knell for clams (not to mention fish, often). But in
general NE chowder seems to survive canning a lot better than
Manhattan-style does, and I think a lot of the national prejudice
against the Manhattan style comes from people who have only had the
canned products. Comparing the two only against each other, the New
England always wins. But homemade, Manhattan is just as good. Not
necessarily better, and subject to personal preferences, but overall,
just as good. The key is to not overcook any of it, use fresh
ingredients, and remember that this is supposed to be a fish or clam
chowder containing some tomatoes, _not_ tomato soup with clams in it.
I like making a fine dice or julienne of peeled, seeded tomato, and
almost garnishing with it, rather than letting it take over the soup.
I think it makes a nice addition to what would otherwise be a
perfectly recognizable chowder.

This is kind of like the old Star Trek segment about the tribal
warfare between the Yangs and the Coms, with neither side having any
notion of what the Cold War was about, or that there ever was one,
they just argue because war is all they've ever known...

Now. Somewhere, I have nice recipes for tomato-enhanced fish
chowders, both in William Woys Weaver's "America Eats", and in "I
Hear America Cooking", whose author's name has escaped me for the
moment. Barbara something, I think... I also have my own recipe
_somewhere_ on disk, coincidentally locked, until just this past
weekend, onto a CD whose format I did not have the equipment
necessary to read. I'll look for it now that I have a working CD
re-writer.

>
>-Gytha "Words taste good with cream sauce." Karlsdotter
>
>:)

I've always felt the the best test of a fine sauce is what you can
get somebody to eat when it's covered with it. A truly fine sauce,
people will eat on old tires, barbed wire, that sort of thing. Maybe
broken glass... it doesn't take much to help down a properly cooked
lobster, though. I've often wondered about whether I might eat an old
shingle if napped with a perfect Sauce Foyot...

Adamantius

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