Building a Chowder

There is a world of difference between a true chowder and the soupy, flour-thickened stuff you find in the run-of-the-mill seafood restaurant. My own ideal chowder would recreate what I imagine was a simple, one-pot meal constructed by the fisherman while he was out on the cold, cold waters of the Atlantic, waiting to pull in his lines. It would be made with the simplest ingredients, and not too many of them either.

Note that chowder making once was all the rage in New England. Families and friends would pile into sail boats with their pot and other essentials and make a weekend out of boiling up a chowder while on the beach of some wind-blown island.

What you see here is something very close to my own ideal--not a soup, certainly, and not even a stew. Something closer to a creamy muddle. It's made very simply by layering onions, potatoes, fish and crackers in a heavy pot, then covering it with a seafood broth and baking in the oven. Before bringing the pot to the table, a generous amount of heavy cream is poured into the brew and returned to the oven so that it emerges with a deliciously caramelized top.

This must be a very ancient and widespread technique, because we make a similar seafood stew with Portuguese origins. The basic ingredients are almost identical--onions, potatoes, fish and shellfish--but of course the seasonings are not and there is no cream involved. We love that stew also because it is so simple and everything cooks together, all at once, in the same pot, which then becomes the serving vessel set on a trivet in the middle of the table. It's a wonderful way to entertain a group of friends who are easily satisfied with a bowl of stew and perhaps a simple dessert as well, such as gingerbread cake with whipped cream. Imagine such a meal washed down with a hearty beer, or maybe a tall glass of sparkling wine.

This particular recipe comes from Jasper White's 50 Chowders, one of the best-researched volumes on the subject. If you like chowders and want to know how to make them properly, this would be a very good place to start.

In olden times, a chowder like this would be made with cod fillets, or perhaps haddock if company were coming for dinner. But since cod and haddock have very nearly been wiped out in the Atlantic, and since humankind is working so hard to destroy the rest of the ocean ecosystem, we have to be careful about which kind of fish we use in our chowder. I try to follow the guidelines of the Monterey Bay Aquarium's "Seafood Watch" program.

Lately I've been using hake--it is such a bargain compared to most other fish in the market--but now I find that only certain kinds of hake are considered a "good alternative" by "Seafood Watch." Halibut would be an excellent choice, and I suppose you could also substitute striped bass or even catfish and, as a last resort, farmed tilapia. In fact, you really don't recognize the fish much when the chowder pot comes out of the oven. But it is rather more satisfying to bite into a solid piece of fish, rather than something that has simply disintegrated in the cooking process.

If I have time and some fish bones, I make fresh fish broth or fumet for this chowder. It really is the best and doesn't require much time or trouble. Otherwise, use a quality commercial seafood stock such as Kitchen Basics.

One further note: fisherman used to make chowders with a tough cracker called "hard tack" that later came to be known as the "Pilot Cracker." Nabisco had planned to cease making the "Pilot Cracker" until a group of ladies in Maine rose up in protest. It's hard to find these thick and very plain crackers outside New England. But I found that the very thin and humble water cracker makes a pretty good substitute just crushed with the hand into bite-size pieces.

4 ounces salt pork, rind removed and sliced very thinly
4 tablespoons unsalted butter
2 large onions, peeled, halved and thinly sliced lengthwise
1 tablespoon chopped fresh thyme leaves
2 dried bay leaves
1/4 teaspoon ground cloves
1/4 teaspoon nutmeg
1 1/2 pounds Yukon Gold or similar potatoes, peeled and sliced very thinly
kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper
2 1/2 pounds skinless white fish fillets (such as halibut)
4 ounces water crackers, broken into bite-size pieces
5 cups fish stock
1 1/2 cups heavy cream
chopped parsley for garnish

Pre-heat oven to 400 degrees

Fry salt pork at the bottom of a large, heavy pot or Dutch oven until just browned. Remove salt pork and save for later.

Add to the pot butter, onions, thyme, bay leaves, cloves and nutmeg. Gently saute onions until soft but not browned, about 10 minutes. Remove from heat and let cool.

To build the chowder, put 1/3 of the onion mixture at the bottom pot, followed by half the potatoes, then half the fish fillets, then half the crackers, seasoning along the way with salt and ground pepper. Repeat with another layer, using the final 1/3 of the onions to cover the fish. Pour the fish stock over everything using the handle of a wooden spoon, if necessary, to poke through the ingredients and make sure the stock fills in from the bottom. Place over moderate heat on the stove until the liquid begins to steam.

Put the pot, covered, in the stove and bake until the potatoes are just cooked through, about 30 minutes. Scatter the cooked salt pork over the top of the chowder and pour in the cream. Return to oven, uncovered, for 15 minutes longer, at which point the cream should be browning around the edges.

Ladle the chowder into preheated bowls and garnish with parsley. Serve with your favorite beer or wine. Or perhaps you have a bottle of local hard cider you enjoy?

The Last Fish: Lobster Chowder

This is the first in an occasional series about good seafood choices, based on the recommendations of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Seafood Watch program.

A client recently requested a "special" birthday dinner for a friend who loves seafood. I could not think of anything more decadent and delicious than meaty lobster chowder. And isn't it nice to have such a generous patron who can afford to foot the bill?

I turned to the Monterey Bay Aquarium's "Seafood Watch" listing fully expecting to find that my Maine lobster was an "excellent" choice. But, lo, Maine lobster rises only to "good" alternative, mainly because no one is quite sure how many lobsters there are out in the oceans and because management of the species is considered to be not the best. Also, right whales and other mammals are apt to become tangled in lobster traps.

There are other lobsters that rate as "excellent" choices. There's the trap-caught spiny lobster from the U.S. and Australia, for instance, and the wild-caught spiny lobster from the Baja penninsula. But avoid the Caribbean spiny lobster: These typically are overfished and harvested too young.

Lobster chowder violates some of my most basic principles for chowder. It's not simple, and it's certainly not cheap. My favorite method for making an authentic chowder is to layer fish with onions, potatoes and pilot crackers in a pot and cover it with fish stock. I can easily imagine the ancient mariner constructing just such a frugal, one-pot dish is his vessel out at sea.

For a lobster chowder, you first need to cook the lobsters, then clean them. We used seven 1 1/2-pound Maine lobsters to feed 12 people. The lobsters were lowered two-at-a-time into a large pot of boiling salted water and cooked four minutes, just to the verge of doneness. Harvesting the meat is a mess: winter lobsters have hard shells (it's the peelers, or soft-shelled lobsters, you see at the lobster shacks in summer). I used poultry shears to open the tails and a cleaver to crack open the claws. Be sure to spread newspapers over your work area. There will be lots of wetness and goo.

Jaspar White, whose 50 Chowders is the text I use as a reference, recommends making a stock by cooking the lobster carcasses for one hour with water, white wine, chopped tomatoes, sliced onions, celery, carrots, garlic, thyme, bay leaves, fennel seeds and black peppercorns. I cooked my stock very gently for four hours to achieve a rich flavor. After straining out all the solids, I then reduced the stock by about 25 percent over low heat, skimming it frequently. It is a very potent brew, indeed.

The stock can be made a day ahead. To finish the chowder, saute four ounces of slab bacon, cut into small pieces, at the bottom of a heavy pot until almost crisp. Remove the bacon pieces and cook a large onion, cut into medium dice, and the leaves from two or three sprigs thyme, chopped fine, in the bacon fat. (If there's not enough fat, add some butter. Nobody said this was a heart-healthy dish.) Stir in two teaspoons Hungarian paprika and cook one minute longer, stirring frequently.

Now add to the pot 1 1/2-pounds Yukon Gold or other all-purpose potatoes cut into 3/4-inch pieces. Cover with lobster stock, turn up the heat and boil, covered, until the potatoes are cooked through. If the chowder doesn't seem thick enough, mash some of the potatoes using a potato masher.

Using three hard-shell lobsters, this will make enough chowder to feed six people. Just before serving, stir the lobster meat--cut into generous pieces--and up to 2 cups heavy cream into the chowder. Season to taste with salt and freshly ground black pepper. Ladle the chowder into large, shallow bowls and garnish with fresh chives.. We serve it with a basket of yeasted sweet potato rolls on the table.

Traditional Corn Chowder

The truth is I had corn left over from making spoon bread (see earlier post), four ears to be exact, or just the right amount to make some corn chowder. I was determined to make a chowder that allowed the corn flavor to shine, with the ingredients I had on hand.

This, I imagine, is the way chowders started, with the most basic ingredients and not requiring a trip to the supermarket. Yes, you can put just about anything in your chowder--celery, different colored bell peppers, your favorite herbs, even a big ol' lump of crab meat. But as I said, I wanted to keep this simple, focusing more on extracting as much flavor from my leftover corn as possible. This is the kind of dish a farm family would make at the end of a long day, not something to fuss over.


To make a chowder for six to eight persons, start with four exceedingly fresh ears of your favorite corn. Shuck the corn and remove the kernels by setting a small ceramic bowl upside-down inside a large mixing bowl and cutting the kernels away from the cob with a serrated bread knife. Set the kernels aside. Break the four cobs in half and place them in a pot with 4 cups (1 quart) water. Bring to a boil, then lower heat and cook for two hours to create a stock for the chowder. (To keep the cobs submerged in the water, I cover them with a collapsible stainless steaming basket.)

Meanwhile, cut four thick strips of bacon into small pieces and cook them with a bit of vegetable oil over moderate heat in the bottom of a heavy pot or Dutch oven large enough to contain your chowder. (If bacon is not something you eat, substitute vegetable oil for the rendered bacon grease in the next step). Remove the bacon when it is just crispy and brown to your liking. Add 1 medium onion, cut into small dice, to the hot bacon grease or oil, season with salt and cook until soft. Add 1 clove garlic, minced, and cook a few minutes more. Now add the raw corn kernels and the finished corn stock, raise the heat until the chowder comes to a boil, then reduce heat and cook for 30 minutes, or until the corn is soft and the flavors have melded.

While the chowder is still cooking, stir in 1 cup heavy cream (or whole milk if you are watching the fat content). Season with about 1 teaspoon kosher salt (or to taste), 1/2 teaspoon ground cumin and freshly ground black pepper and remove from heat.

At this point I like to process half the chowder in a blender, then add it back to the pot, only because I like a smoother texture. But you don't have to. If you do use the blender, remember to place a kitchen towel over the lid so you don't burn your hand while holding the lid in place. You can make this chowder a day ahead. The flavors will meld while it sits in the refrigerator.

Serve hot, garnished with the browned bacon bits and a generous sprig of fresh cilantro.

Chowder Dustup: Raging Bull

Those of you who read yesterday's post may have noticed that I did not name the author of the chowder article on the National Public Radio website that prompted me to rise so vigorously in defense of traditional New England chowder.

Well, the author has unmasked himself. He is Kevin Weeks, a chef in Knoxville, Tennessee, who also writes a weekly column for the Spot-On website as well as maintaining his own highly literate food blog, Seriously Good. As if that didn't keep him busy enough, he is also one of the triumvirate writing a very thoughtful and worthy blog detailing the craft of bread making, A Year in Bread.

Clearly, a food writer to be reckoned with.

Kevin must be commended for his gracious response to my review of his NPR take on chowder, in which he asserted that just about anything with chunky bits of food in it qualifies as a chowder. He even said that he has "had many of the same thoughts" as those I propounded here yesterday--saying to Kevin, in essence, that his premise just don't hold water.

I did get a bit of a spanking from some of Kevin's fans, one of whom suggested I am at times "brusque." Well, read the mission statement, folks. I didn't sign up for a popularity contest. I've already spent a career in the traditional media, having my thoughts trimmed and colorized by editors and corporate owners. I've staked out a small territory here in the non-profit blogosphere, and I plan to defend it. Fellow bloggers may wander into my sights. I intend to show neither fear nor favor. I do pledge never to write with malice, and will try to maintain a sense of humor.

In his post last night--titled Ed, You Ignorant Slut--Kevin conceded a little in the debate over what constitutes a true chowder. But he also mounted a robust defense of his own. He referenced definitions of chowder from several well-respected sources: Food Lover's Companion, The Food Encyclopedia, and The Joy of Cooking.

I think it only fair that I should come clean with the sources for my own adherence to a more Luddite view of chowder. Besides the more or less annual summer vacations and personal chowder making in Maine over the last dozen years, these would include Good Maine Food, by Marjorie Mosser; Mainstays of Maine, by Robert P. Tristam Coffin; Downeast Chowder in Serious Pig, by John Thorne; and 50 Chowders, by Jasper White.

Perhaps at a later point readers will allow me to describe my own favorite method for making a chowder. For now, I will leave the subject with thanks to Kevin Weeks for being such a good sport. I don't think there's anything wrong with fellow bloggers duking it out occasionally over subjects they feel passionately about. I also give you this portrait of a chowder by Robert P. Tristam Coffin in Mainstays of Main:

"Cod's-head chowder: The first ingredient is the outdoors. And a blazing blue, hot Maine Summer's day. And the place should be an island. And you should catch the cod yourself and cook them, with the sea still kicking in them, before they are done flapping, in an old-fashioned iron kettle. But failing the outdoors, an island off the Maine coast, and fish you have just caught yourself, you can do a lot by bringing an iron kettle, a hot fire, and some very fresh young codfish together. You begin with salt pork, as usual. You fry it out in the kettle till it is dark brown, then throw in onions and fry them till they squirm brown. Then douse in water and bring it to a boil. Throw in sliced or diced potatoes and get them boiling. In with your fish then, heads and all, with only the eyes extracted. Cook till the fish begin to flake apart. Now put the kettle on the back of the stove, and add milk--as much as you think is right--which has already been scalded, to prevent its curdling. Pour it in slow, flavor to spread. Then put in Boston crackers--the round, tough crackers made without shortening--to float and soak up the flavor, and salt and pepper to taste. And there you are. If you don't think the world is a fine place to be in, in spite of wars and taxes, after that, then you are a person who has a soul that could be put in a peanut shell, and you are beyond redemption. If you could wait two days to eat the chowder, you would be even happier."

In my world, Mr. Coffin says it all. A true chowder is infused with meaning, with associations of time and place that are immutable and form our collective food memory. The other stuff--the asparagus, the squash, the mushrooms, the tomatoes--are merely evidence of a food apparatus that marches to no particular drummer, the transitory figments of a chef's longing to create something memorable out of thin air.

And Kevin, the bowl of potato soup you couldn't resist posting on your blog last night looks very tasty. It might even qualify as a chowder.

(To read Kevin's full reply, go here.)

Chowder: The Great Identity Theft

We here at The Slow Cook have pledged to stamp out creeping food fad-ism wherever it raises its ugly head. So today we are mounting a defense of traditional chowder, which has been so badly maligned in a "Kitchen Window" column dated April 11 on the National Public Radio website.

"Chowder? In the spring?" the author asks, as if anyone other than the editors at NPR were looking for a spring chowder.

He then goes on to assert:

"But there is no real reason chowders should be limited to a particular season."

Really?

"The word, actually, can be applied to any thick, rich soup containing chunks of food."

It can?

To which we must reply: DON'T YOU BELIEVE IT!

Any soup with chunks of food in it? Was anyone awake at NPR when this piece of foolery floated over the transom? Does the editor have a clue what chowder is?

The reader is then subjected to three new takes on "chowder," one of them based on asparagus, another on Cajun shrimp (I swear, I am not making this up), and a third on potatoes.

None of which, I would like to point out, bear any spiritual kinship whatsoever with actual chowder.

Chowder dates most likely to the 18th century and in its original form consisted of the most basic fisherman's provisions: salt pork, onions, hardtack (later to become Pilot Bread), fish and water. It was with these simple ingredients that men hard at work foraging food from the cold waters of the North Atlantic sustained themselves aboard their wooden vessels.

It wasn't until the 19th Century that a recipe for chowder actually appeared in an American cookbook, and not until mid-century that ingredients such as potatoes and milk began to gain acceptance. At this point, chowder entered the popular lexicon. Families took to "chowdering" on the weekends, which meant loading a boat with a big pot and utensils, sailing off to an island and cooking a batch of chowder on the beach, as depicted in the drawing above.

Later, Midwestern famers would appropriate the technique for making a chowder of corn.

Fast-forward 150 years and we have a complete perversion of the chowder tradition. It seems that if you simply twist the definition of a chowder a little--easy to do on a computer keyboard--anything that swims in a bowl can be called a chowder.

"Given such a simple definition, chowders can take advantage of whatever the season offers," the author of the NPR piece avers. (Or is this just a simple-minded editor talking?) Thus, we now have chowders with cheese, chowders with squash, chowders with mushrooms. Any backwater chef trying to goose his menu a little can call his tomato soup a "summer chowder."

Then there is this pretzel-shaped piece of logic: "In spring, beets make a delicious, colorful chowder usually called borscht."

Exactly! Soup made out of beets already has a name. It's called "borscht." Why in the world do we need to change it to chowder?

I believe this is a problem of too many food writers with too much time on their hands. A 24-hour news cycle facilitated by the internet now requires more copy than we can actually provide. Thus, we are now about re-categorizing and re-naming all of our foods to keep the writers and the editors busy.

This would not be such a problem except that mongrelizing a traditional food such as chowder simply sucks all the meaning out of the dish. We who care about how America eats often rue the fact that there is no "national" cuisine in the way of, say, the French or the Italians, that our food heritage always seems to be borrowed from somewhere else. We cling to those traditions that we do have: The Cajun tradition, the Southern tradition, the barbeque tradition and, yes, the New England chowder tradition.

The last thing we need are food writers misappropriating our regional traditions simply to satisfy some venal craving for new and different foods. If you are so bored with the foods we already have, if you are so badly in need of something new and different, I say make something up, but don't call it a chowder. Better yet, keep it to yourself.

Note to NPR: The Cajun already have a shrimp gumbo. They don't need a shrimp chowder.

And if you think I'm making this up, you can read the actual NPR article at http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=9497433

Oh, and this would be a perfect time for a nice bowl of asparagus soup.