North America · Volume 31, Salt Pork, Scrapple and the Cold Atlantic Table
New England Clam Chowder
New England, United States
An illustration of the dish, not a photograph of it cooked.
- Time
- Not statedNo source states a time and the atlas has too few comparable dishes to estimate one.
- Reviewed
- Not yet reviewed from inside the tradition
- Cooked
- Not yet cooked and reported
As tradition built it
New England Clam Chowder
Simmer roughly 15 minutes; New England cream style
Ingredients
- 1/4 lb, cubed (or 6 rashers bacon) salt pork or bacon
- 1, chopped onion
- 6 medium, diced potato
- 1 quart (from shucking the clams, or bottled) clam liquor or stock
- 2 cups milk plus 2 cups half-and-half milk or cream
- 4 dozen hard-shell clams, shucked (or 1 quart shucked clams with their liquor) clams
Method
- Render the salt pork or bacon for five to ten minutes.
- Sauté the onion in the rendered fat.
- Add the potato and clam liquor or stock and simmer roughly fifteen minutes, until the potato is tender.
- Stir in the milk or cream only once the pot is off the highest heat; one long-standing version rests it a full thirty minutes first to guard against curdling.
- Add the clams last, heating them through only briefly so they do not toughen.
Notes
Jasper White's 50 Chowders remains this genre's standard reference, and his stated principle is not negotiable within the tradition: “you can't have a chowder without salt pork.”
Three regional styles exist: New England's own cream style; Manhattan's tomato style, built by Italian and Portuguese immigrant communities in New York and Rhode Island and first named in a 1934 cookbook; and Rhode Island's own clear-broth style, no cream, no tomato, associated with South County and possibly the closest of the three to the original eighteenth-century dish, since parts of Rhode Island resisted the 1830s dairy trend that gave the other two their identity.
In 1939 the Maine legislature genuinely debated a bill to make tomatoes in chowder illegal.
What a modern chef changes
Salt pork carried invisibly through the base
Cross-refs Rung 01, chowder's dairy-off-heat emulsion
Method
- Blend the rendered salt pork fat with the clam liquor in a high-power blender before it goes anywhere near the pot, then pass it through a chinois, carrying the salt pork's whole flavour into the base without a single visible fleck of it in the finished bowl.
- Cook the potato sous vide in a portion of the finished, unthickened clam stock, at a temperature that holds it at a perfect, uniform tenderness rather than the ragged doneness a rolling boil gives.
- Warm the cream separately to just below the pot's own temperature before folding it in, taking the traditional off-heat caution one step further so the emulsion never has to recover from a temperature shock at all.