New England Clam Chowder: Food That Survived Time

There are some dishes that are essentially cultural in their application. When we say the word of the dish, it connects us with a time and a place, and especially a region and maybe a type of person. And today we're gonna be looking at the origins specifically of one of those kinds of dishes. In fact, it's one of those dishes that I have sort of left off the table. We're gonna be looking at the chowder. We think of New England chowder, don't we? It's a fish soup, stew, something like that, but it's got so much deeper origins than just some kind of modern dish. It goes back into the 18th century and much further than that. It's connected to the kinds of vessels it's cooked in. It definitely connects to particular regions and the connections to fishing, to being on the ocean, to a lot of different factors. And all these add together to make the chowder that we think of today. So let's set the stage for this dish. We're working along the coast. Maybe this is connected with sailors or with fishermen or with people living along the coast. They have available to them the kinds of food ingredients that sailors and fishermen would have. So fish, obviously. We're gonna have ship's biscuit. We're gonna have salt pork and some other sometimes connected ingredients. But those are really the main kinds of ingredients. Now, this shows up in a chowder. Now, granted, today's chowders are different than that. All these foods go through evolutions and they change. We're gonna be talking about the 18th century version or the 19th century version of chowder. But let's look at this 18th century version. We've got our fish, we've got our salt pork, and we got ship's biscuit. There are a couple of different dishes that connect with those that are related to living on board ship or being connected with the ocean, fishermen, et cetera. That is lobscaus, which we've covered here on the channel before. And there's a dish called sea pie, which I've also covered. These are all very seafaring kind of dishes or at least something you would have along the shoreline. And of course, most of 18th century America is right along the shoreline. So how are these different and how are these the same? They all have ship's biscuit, they all have salt pork, and they are all easy to cook. Our chowder, which you're gonna find is definitely different than a modern chowder, is cooked in layers in the 18th century, we put in a layer of this, a layer of this ingredient, a layer of another ingredient, we're gonna add a bunch of water to it, and then we're gonna let that simmer for a long period of time. We might even submerge it and boil it or something strange like that. But that's also similar to a sea pie. It has a flour paste around it and it has layers of items and then they're baked for a long period of time. So a sea pie is like that. And what's going on with the lobscaus? Well, it has almost all the same ingredients. It's got salt pork and it's got our ship's biscuit and it's got some other ingredients like onions or maybe even potatoes in it, which are very related to seafaring. So if we know what a chowder is today, what is a chowder in the 18th century and where does the word even come from? The word itself tells us what its older, more primitive connections are. And the chowder word, it is believed, either comes from the word that has to do with cauldron, which is in French and is called berry and all these strange permutations of that word that kind of turns into a chowder. And we certainly have these traditions along the coast in France where the fishermen would get together with their catch of the day and they would use a great big pot or cauldron to cook a giant fish stew. And that's probably the origins of the chowder. That comes to England, that also connects directly with France and parts of North America. So we have these multiple reference points of this probably 16th and 17th century connections about fishermen cooking and creating this fish stew with the word. And we also have a possible connection of the idea of some people in England, fish sellers having the name chowder. But you know, all those are a little nebulous. We don't know exactly how we get to the term, but the term does show up in the 18th century, chowder itself. We have a 1732 reference where somebody is speaking and he says that he had a chowdered cod that the captain caught. He's talking about the cod itself that the captain caught this particular fish and then they had it chowdered, which probably means in the fish stew. We also have the recipe showing up in a poem, which Ryan will talk about later on. It's almost a poem that's a recipe. We also have a recipe for chowder that's in Hannah Glass's, The Art of Cookery, the quintessential kind of cookbook for the 18th century English. And the funny thing is she says it's a chowder, a sea dish. So she connects it directly with sailors, with fishermen and with living along the coast. Here's an interesting connection. We just had Hannah Glass talking about chowder, a sea dish. This is from like 1758 edition, possibly even earlier than that. Here's Joseph Banks and he took a tour, a voyage to Newfoundland and he's writing in 1766. So, I mean, you know, eight years after it shows up in Hannah Glass's cookbook, which is obviously very popular in England. And here's Joseph Banks. He's in Newfoundland and he's talking about chowder. He says, the dish they made of it, he's talking about the fish, called chowder, which I believe is peculiar to this country, though here it is the chief food of the poor and when well made of luxury, a luxury that the rich, even in England, at least in my opinion, might be fond of. It is a soup made with a small quantity of salt pork cut into small slices, a good deal of fish and biscuit boiled for about an hour. Unlikely as this mixture appears to be palatable, I have scarce met with anybody in this country who is not fond of it. So here he is in Newfoundland, sort of up the coast there from New England and he's talking about chowder and how it's very, very popular and people in England might even enjoy this and yet eight years before that, there's already a recipe for it and he doesn't even know about it. Today we are going to be covering two different recipes for the same dish, but it's spanning quite a few years and now we know this dish is chowder in modern day as a term and sometimes even for a specific dish and we're gonna cover all of that here, but right now we're gonna start in the 18th century. Now this dish is kind of funny because it doesn't seem to change a whole lot since when we first see it in 1750s through the 1780s or at least the early 1780s, there are a lot of recipes that you can look and they're doing pretty much the same thing, but the one that we're using right now is a poem because this is folk food and we're gonna celebrate that today. Here's the first recipe. First, lay some onions to keep the pork from burning. Because in chowder, there can be no turning. Then lay some pork in slices very thin. Thus, you in chowder always must begin. Next, lay some fish cut crossways very nice. Then season well with pepper, salt and spice. Parsley, sweet marjoram, savory and thyme. Then biscuit next, which must be soaked some time. Thus your foundation laid, you will be able to raise a chowder high as tower of Babel. For by repeating or the same again, you may make chowder for a thousand men. Last bottle of claret with water enough to smother them. This dish is all about layering. So what this poem is telling us is you follow the order and how you layer this, and then you can stack it infinitely depending on how big of a dish or how many people that you're trying to feed. Now we're doing a small version of this because I'm just gonna taste this and then maybe take it home and let my family have it later. We don't need a huge amount. So we're just doing this process one time. The first thing you wanna do is go ahead and put your onions at the bottom. Now you can do this in different ways. I decided to leave them in rings to give it a little bit of height for the pork to be off the bottom because that's the whole point. We don't wanna burn our pork. The salt pork that you're using, that needs to be soaked before. I pre-soaked mine. On top of the pork goes fish. Now they were using all sorts of fish. It doesn't really matter what you use in this. Just go ahead and get whatever fish that you like or you can access. Put that next layer on. Then we're going to salt, pepper, and add our herbs. Use whatever herbs you want. It does call for some specific herbs. If you can get those, get them. If you can't, that's okay. Just make sure that you pack some flavor into this because it's gotta carry through and permeate everything. We've got some strong flavors in here and we want some freshness. After that, we're gonna put on our ship's biscuits. There's probably a little bit of back and forth on whether or not you pre-soak them because the poem says they need to be soaked. The question is do they need to be soaked before they go in or are they soaking during the cooking process and that's giving you a hint that this is gonna need to cook for a while. It's up in the air on that. Other people might say, well, you need to crush this. Maybe you don't. You see a lot of recipes, especially later for chowder, where they're adding flour and so maybe that is a good idea but what I did is I'm just leaving them as whole as I have them because some of them have already broken up for other purposes and then I'm just gonna let them cook down. After that, clear it and water. You can play with this. You can use whatever wine suits your palate best. You can say it just a little bit and I'm going to add more water. I wanted to see how much that was gonna come through in this so I used quite a bit. Do whatever you wanna do. After that, all of the recipe is called for covering this dish because you want this all to cook together and hold as much steam inside as possible and I don't have any lids that fit these pots so I just made a quick paste and we're gonna cover everything on top. After that, get it over the fire. We do not know how long we want to cook this for. Some recipes call for four hours but you don't know how big that is. This is a much smaller version. I'm gonna start with an hour and I'm gonna check it out and I will let you know as we go. Our next recipe for chowder comes from the 1830s and we see some transitioning happen here. This particular recipe is from the frugal housewife. The title right there, the frugal housewife, lets you know this is kind of bare bones cooking still but even still, the addition of some new ingredients shows you that this is becoming more of an elevated dish and so this is still for the same type of people along the seaboard but they've grabbed onto this thing that's been around for quite a while and now they're making it into something a little bit fancier, maybe a little bit more palatable. So this is how it goes. Four pounds of fish are enough to make a chowder for four or five people. Half a dozen slices of salt pork in the bottom of a pot. Hang it high so that the pork may not burn. Take it out when done very brown. Put in a layer of fish, cut lengthwise slices. Put in a layer of crackers, small or sliced onions and potatoes sliced as thin as a fourpence. Mix with pieces of pork you have fried. Then a layer of fish again and so on. Six crackers are enough. Stew a little salt and pepper over each layer. Over the whole pour a bowl full of flour and water enough to come up even with the surface of what you have in the pot. A sliced lemon adds to the flavor. A cup of tomato ketchup is very excellent. Some people put in a cup of beer. A few clams are a pleasant addition. It should be covered so as to not let a particle of steam escape if possible. Do not open it except when nearly done to taste if it be well seasoned. First things first is they call for us to fry this pork before we begin layering this recipe. Now it asks for it to be very brown. Now that's just gonna depend a lot on what you're cooking it in too. I wouldn't be so concerned about that. We just wanna make sure that you go ahead and get it cooked some because it's going to finish as it boils as well and we don't want those pieces of pork to be tough. After you get your pork browned, you're gonna take that outside of the side and we're gonna put fish on the bottom layer. After the fish comes crackers. Now what they're talking about is something like a ship's biscuit. Crackers did develop a little bit in the time between the 18th century and the early 19th century but we're sticking with ship biscuit here. If that's what you have, go ahead and use it. Then it calls for us to layer in the onions and the potatoes and the pork. Another addition to this recipe is clams. Now notice we don't see this as the main component to this dish. It's almost an afterthought. It's like hey, if you wanna add some clams, that's pleasant. Now one of the things that the recipe calls for is that you salt and pepper in between each layer. I didn't do that because I wasn't thinking about it. So at the end, I put enough salt and pepper in for the whole dish and we're gonna see what happens there. When you're doing it at home, feel free to salt and pepper in between each layer. Now it gives us some options. It says lemon peels make it nice. It talks about tomato ketchup. It talks about beer. I would rather have beer than tomato ketchup personally so I put some beer in there. So what they want us to do next is kind of like a thickening agent and it reminds me of how my grandmother cooks. But we're going to put some flour and water together. We're gonna mix that up and then we're gonna put that in until we can put the liquid up to the top. Again, for this recipe, I'm using a similar pot or exact same pot as the last one. So I'm making a lid out of paste and I'm fashioning that. We're gonna put it over top. You can do that at home if you want to if you don't have a lid to fit your pot. After that, we're just gonna put it on the fire and we're gonna set it to cook and I'm going to start with an hour and we're gonna see how it's looking. A couple of things that I think are really interesting about this exercise is that we're talking about folk food here. And so folk food is handed down in a way that we don't always know a time and a place where it started. We don't know the first recipe and this food changes over time. So we see chowder now as a thicker soup, right? That's what we know chowder to be. Although the origins to this dish, we don't really know exactly where they come from and what its first version was, the earliest versions we have done in our first recipe. But who knows, did this come from lobster? Is there an origin there? It's using a lot of the same ingredients. We can't say definitively yes, but we do wonder what's going on. And now when we talk about chowder, we're talking about a thick soup and it depends kind of regionally. And it's interesting, isn't it? That it's still kind of procured from what you have at your disposal. So we think New England clam chowder. That's probably the most famous one. In the Midwest, we have corn chowder and that depends also on what you have at your disposal. Usually corn chowder, number one, it always has corn. Usually it has potatoes in it. Sometimes it has chicken, sometimes it has bacon. And it's kind of like, okay, we're going to make this thick soup and we're gonna throw in whatever protein we have, but it's gonna have corn in it, darn it. And that's corn chowder. Now, New England clam chowder, same kind of thing where we know it as usually having particular things in it. Sometimes it's root vegetables or whatever, but it depends on what people have at their disposal. And that's the wonderful thing about folk food. We have this recipe that is just a poem. Now that's a wonderful thing because it's an easy way for even like children to learn the poem and they know how to cook this. Or you can tell a neighbor, you can tell a friend. And that is the beautiful thing about how some of these dishes from the time period come to be is there's an idea and somebody adds something and somebody adds something and somebody adds something. And sooner or later, it gets to be known as this dish is, and it has a name and it has what you automatically think to go in it and people know what you're talking about. All from just grassroots word of mouth kind of recipe. The second thing that I think is really interesting about this kind of food and by kind, I mean, seafarer food. Now I'm not saying that this dish was necessarily made aboard ship, but this is connected to the sea. And so it's hard to tell what has melded together to get this dish because these are well-traveled people. And so when you have people from England going up to Scandinavia, when you have people from the new world coming over here from England, when you have France and England semi-close to each other, what you're doing is you're mixing cross cultures into a dish over time, who knows where it started and who knows what the original four ingredients might've been. But it is interesting that across cultures, what's known as this is a dish that's made from layering, from packing things in and adding liquid and it has seafood in it. And then original recipes for chowder, you're going to consistently see fish. It doesn't matter whether we're eating a modern chowder or one that's based on a recipe that's 300 years old. We are connecting with everyone that is in the past along the coast, on board ship, eating these very same dishes. It doesn't matter whether they were in New England or in Newfoundland or along the coast of Great Britain or even in France, they're all enjoying the same thing. Here are our chowders and they are looking different than I thought that they would. Now, I will go ahead and admit right now that a paste is not the most airtight seal. As it cooks, it cracks. But I don't think that there would be a whole lot more moisture in these anyways because there's so much ship's biscuit in there. And then the second one has flour. So let's start off right here. This is the first one. This is the second one. So this is the earlier one that we're going to try that first. And it does seem to have a little bit more moisture in it. But if the precursors, which I don't think we can say definitively, but if similar ideas we'll say are sea pie and lobsters, both of those are kind of like hatch like dishes. And so these are both the same hatch like dish kind of format. I can smell the claret really strongly, but I can also smell the herbs. So I think everything is coming through. Let's give this one a try. This is the one from the 18th century. Hmm, that's really good. It's homey. There's a lot of protein in there. It's on the salty side, but the salt pork is going to do that. There's nothing really to do about that. The ship's biscuit is interesting because it just gives some of my body and almost creaminess to the whole dish. It's actually quite pleasant. And I was thinking that the wine was going to take over, but it doesn't. This is our second one over here. This one has extra ingredients. I want to see if the lemon comes through. I want to see what the clams doing in there. There's a potato onion kind of mash thing going on. I didn't taste a whole lot of onion in this first one. In spite, I've got some pork and some fish and potato. I got everything in here. Okay, let's see how it all comes together. Man, okay. Everything automatically, boom, salt, right? But this is a little bit more leveled out than the first one. And I think that there's just more stuff to soak it up. The potato isn't an individual thing, neither is the onion. It's all kind of come together with the ship biscuit and it's kind of just a texture, which is really nice, but all the flavors are there. So this is really beautiful. I actually, I would eat this regularly. I love this. I probably should have added more clam. It's not adding a whole lot. I think that that would be a lot better. So I'll add more clams next time. I might even cut them up into smaller bits. I'm not sure, but this is a really good dish and I can see with the flavor profile here, how we get to modern day New England clam chowder. This is getting closer and from the 1760s or so to the 1830s, you can see that big jump there is getting us to where we need to be. I would like to cook this again sometime with a better fitting lid without paste and see how much more liquid is there, but I really don't think that it's gonna make much of a difference. I think that this, for the time period, is more of a hash and it's really, really good.