[Sca-cooks] chowder - OOP

[Erika Thomenius]

>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...

The roux, cream or milk, taters, onions and clams version.


>>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.

Now, this I hadn't even considered.  I'm a thousand miles from the nearest
ocean, and if it's even remotely fresh, I'm glad for it.


>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.

Well, see, that's the thing.  When I've tasted it, and when I've seen it
served to my (heathen) friends, it has ALWAYS appeared as a tomato soup with
clams in it.  Is this one of those things for which there are a million
different recipes?

>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...

<mindless fanatic>

Yeah, well... uh... I'm just right and everybody else is wrong!  So there!
Neener neener!

</mindless fanatic>


>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.

Many thanks.  It does remain to be seen, however, if the Pure of Faith can
be tempted.... but I will try it.  :)

>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...

Oh, you bet.  ANYTHING can be made good with enough Hollandaise on it.

-Gytha "Now don't get me started on cheesesteaks" Karlsdotter


-----------------------------------------

Living in fear that someone is going to spot the zipper at the back of my
grown-up suit.


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