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The regional table / Rhode Island

Rhode Island Clear Clam Chowder with Clam Cakes

Published September 22, 2026 · Rhode Island

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Take the milk out of a New England chowder and you do not get a lesser chowder. You get the older one, and the one Rhode Island kept.

The oldest chowders in American print have no milk in them. Lydia Maria Child, The American Frugal Housewife, Samuel S. and William Wood, New York, 1838, cooks clams in nothing but their own liquid: they should boil about fifteen minutes in their own water, no other need be added except a spoonful to keep the bottom shells from burning, and once open they are taken from the shells, washed in their own water and put in a stewing pan while the water is strained through a cloth so as to get out all the grit. Then the clams are simmered in it ten or fifteen minutes with a little thickening of flour and water, half a dozen slices of toasted bread or cracker, and pepper, vinegar and butter to your taste — and one flat line at the end: salt is not needed. Mrs. A. L. Webster, The Improved Housewife, Hartford, 1852, builds receipt 144 the same way, pork fried brown, floured fish and crackers and sliced onions in layers, water just sufficient to cover them, and two teaspoonfuls of flour stirred into the gravy at the end. She adds that clams make a tolerably good chowder and that the hard part of the clam should be cut off and rejected. Neither book has a drop of milk or a spoonful of tomato in a chowder.

Milk and tomato both arrive later, and the name of this state arrives with them. The printing of the Boston Cooking-School Cook Book I could read, whose copyright line runs from 1896 to 1906, gives seven chowders on pages 141 to 144, and one of them is headed Rhode Island Chowder: a quart of clams with a cup of stewed and strained tomatoes, a quarter teaspoon of soda to hold the acid down, a cup of scalded milk, a cup of scalded cream and crackers soaked in cold milk. That is milk and tomato at once, and it is the recipe a McClure syndicate column carried out to the Georgia weeklies under the same title in May 1924. So the phrase Rhode Island Chowder, in national print, meant the opposite of the thing Rhode Island eats. What the state has instead is practice. The Providence Journal account reprinted in the Savannah Morning News of 28 August 1885 — headed Rhode Island's Clams: From Churning for Quahaugs to Cooking the Chowder by Barrels — describes three hundred gallons of chowder as an average course for an excursion party at Rocky Point, and clam cakes swimming in two hundred pounds of lard on top of a big oven at the rate of five barrels of flour a week, and never once says what goes into the chowder. Neither does anything else I could reach: a Providence charity cookbook of 1916 prints a soup chapter and a fish chapter with no clam, no quahaug and no chowder in either. The proportions below are this site's own, worked out for this page; what is documented is what is left out.

Why this version works

Nothing in it can break. Farmer prints a warning under her milk chowder that the clam water has a tendency to cause the milk to separate, and her Rhode Island Chowder needs a quarter teaspoon of soda to keep tomato and cream in the same bowl. Leave both out and the whole class of failure goes with them: this pot can be boiled, held, cooled and reheated without curdling.

Quahogs, not soft clams. The Rhode Island State Census of 1865, quoted in the same federal survey, counted 31,697 bushels of clams against 9,241 of quahaugs; twenty years later the Providence Journal reported that the Rhode Island clam was going out of use for chowder because it has too much grit in its belly and makes a chowder not agreeable to look at, and that two-thirds of the chowder clams were now quahaugs. A clear broth shows every fault, which is why the bay changed clams.

The broth is the entire liquid. Five pounds of quahogs steamed in four cups of water come back as about six cups of clam broth, and that is the whole of what goes in the pot — no stock, no water to make up, no milk. Ernest Ingersoll, writing up the clam fisheries for the federal survey published in 1887, called chowder a thick sort of broth, which is exactly the consistency you are aiming at and nothing like a cream soup.

The cakes run on the same broth. A clam cake is not a fritter with clams in it, it is clam broth made solid enough to fry. The receipt in the Gainesville Eagle of 3 December 1880 is one cup of clam broth, flour, one egg, cream of tartar and soda, dropped from a spoon into hot lard — no milk, no water. An earlier one in the Georgia Citizen of 19 February 1858 chops the clams fine and thickens their liquor with flour to the thickness of pancake batter. Both are the cake Rhode Island still fries.

Ingredient notes

Quahogs: five pounds of hard clams, cherrystone size or the bigger chowders, scrubbed and tight shut. Chowder clams are cheapest and best here because everything gets chopped anyway. Any that will not shut when tapped go in the bin, and any that stay closed after twelve minutes of steam go with them.

Potatoes: a pound and a half of Yukon Gold in half-inch dice. Waxy potatoes hold their corners and leave the broth transparent; a russet dissolves into it and turns the whole pot cloudy, which in a milk chowder passes unnoticed and here is the one thing you were trying to avoid.

Salt pork: three ounces, unsmoked, cut small. Smoke is the one seasoning a clear broth cannot absorb — it sits on top and flattens the clam. If bacon is all your shop has, blanch it two minutes in water first, and keep the crisp scraps for the top of the bowl.

Frying fat: the shore stands used lard and so did both nineteenth-century receipts. Peanut or another neutral oil at 350°F does the same job; whatever you use, you need two inches of it in a deep pot, because a cake dropped into a shallow pan sits on the bottom and sticks instead of floating over and browning both faces.

Step by step

  1. Steam the quahogs open. Put the scrubbed clams in a heavy 6-quart pot with 4 cups of water, cover, and set over medium-high heat. Lift each one out as it opens, from about 8 minutes on; give the stragglers 12 and then give up on them.
  2. Strain the broth and chop the meat. Pour the pot liquor through a sieve lined with a coffee filter, stopping half an inch short of the bottom where the sand sits. You want about 6 cups. Chop the meat coarse — you should have about 2 cups. Set 1 cup of the broth and 1 cup of the meat aside for the cakes and wipe the pot dry.
  3. Render the pork, sweat the onion. Cook the diced salt pork in the dry pot over medium-low heat for 8 to 10 minutes, until the fat has run and the scraps are gold. Lift the scraps onto paper and keep them. Cook the onions in the fat for 5 minutes over medium heat without letting them colour.
  4. Potatoes in clam broth. Add the remaining 5 cups of broth, the potatoes and the pepper. Bring to a simmer and cook 12 to 15 minutes, uncovered, until a cube gives to a knife. Crush three or four cubes against the side of the pot for body and leave it at that; no flour goes in.
  5. Mix the cake batter. Whisk the flour, baking powder and pepper together. Beat the egg into the cold cup of clam broth, pour it into the flour, and fold just until no dry flour is left. Fold in the reserved chopped clams. The batter should drop heavily from a spoon rather than pour. Let it stand 10 minutes while the oil heats to 350°F.
  6. Fry the cakes. Drop heaped tablespoons of batter into the oil, six at a time so the temperature holds, and fry 4 to 5 minutes, turning once, until deep brown all over and hollow-sounding. Drain on a rack, not on paper, and salt them as they come out.
  7. Finish the chowder. Return the chopped clams to the pot, heat 2 minutes and no longer, and taste before you reach for salt. Serve with the pork scraps and parsley on top, the cakes alongside, and cider vinegar on the table for anyone who wants what Child put in hers.
Doughy in the middle is the clam cake's one failure, and it means the fat was too hot or the spoonfuls too big: the outside sets in ninety seconds and the middle never cooks. Break one open before you fry the rest, drop the heat to 350°F, and make them smaller. A chowder that tastes of nothing has been diluted rather than under-seasoned — boil a cup of it down hard for five minutes, stir it back in, and leave the salt alone until you have tasted the result.

Storage and make-ahead

The chowder keeps 4 days refrigerated and reheats without any of the care a milk chowder needs, which is the practical argument for it. Bring it back to a bare simmer on the stove; there is nothing in the pot that can separate.

It also freezes, unlike its neighbours, though the potatoes come back a little grainy. The cakes do not keep at all — they are soft within the hour and leathery the next day, so fry what you will eat and mix the batter fresh.

What to serve with it

This is the whole meal and it is a heavy one, so the third thing on the table should be sharp and cold: cabbage slaw with cider vinegar, or cucumbers in brine, or nothing but a bowl of quartered lemons. Beer over wine. Hot sauce on the cakes is modern and nobody in Rhode Island will stop you.

From the recipe box / Rhode Island

Rhode Island Clear Clam Chowder with Clam Cakes

Quahogs steamed open, their broth turned into the whole liquid of the chowder, and the same broth beaten into a batter and dropped into hot fat for the cakes.

Prep
30 min
Cook
45 min
Total
1 hr 15 min
Serves
6
Calories
540 per serving

Ingredients

Scale

Instructions

  1. Steam the scrubbed clams in a covered 6-quart pot with 4 cups water over medium-high heat, lifting each out as it opens, 8 to 12 minutes.
  2. Strain the liquor through a cloth-lined sieve to get about 6 cups, chop the meat coarse, and set 1 cup of broth and 1 cup of meat aside for the cakes.
  3. Render the salt pork in the dry pot 8 to 10 minutes, reserve the scraps, and cook the onions in the fat 5 minutes without colour.
  4. Add the remaining 5 cups broth, the potatoes and ½ teaspoon pepper, and simmer 12 to 15 minutes, crushing a few cubes against the pot for body.
  5. Whisk the flour, baking powder and remaining ¼ teaspoon pepper, beat the egg into the reserved cold broth, fold the two together with the reserved clams, and rest 10 minutes while the oil heats to 350°F.
  6. Fry heaped tablespoons of batter six at a time, 4 to 5 minutes, turning once, until deep brown; drain on a rack and salt.
  7. Stir the rest of the clams into the chowder, heat 2 minutes, taste for salt, and serve with the pork scraps, parsley, the cakes and vinegar.

Nutrition

Fat27 g (7 g saturated)
Sodium1150 mg
Protein21 g
ServingAbout 1¼ cups chowder and 3 clam cakes
Calories540
Cholesterol65 mg
Carbohydrates53 g (4 g sugar, 4 g fiber)

Nutrition is an estimate calculated from the listed ingredients and is provided as a courtesy, not as dietary advice.

Questions readers ask

Can I use canned clams?

For the chowder, yes: two bottles of clam juice plus a cup of water, and three 6.5-ounce cans of chopped clams added at the very end. For the cakes it matters more, because the broth is the only liquid in the batter — use bottled clam juice rather than water and expect a flatter cake.

Can I add milk or tomato at the table?

You can, and the record will not argue with you: within thirty years of each other, Farmer printed a Connecticut chowder made with tomatoes, a clam chowder made with milk, and a Rhode Island chowder made with both. Add whichever you like to your own bowl. Just do not put it in the pot, because then the rest of the points about reheating and keeping stop being true.

Is the clear one really Rhode Island's?

It is what the state cooks and it is the older form of the dish, but I could not find a printed receipt before 1930 that calls a clear chowder Rhode Island's. The 1885 Providence Journal piece describes the chowder by the barrel without saying what is in it, and a 1916 Providence charity cookbook has no chowder at all. The one thing printed nationally under the name is Farmer's, and it has tomato, milk and cream in it.

Can the clam cakes be baked or air-fried?

No. This batter has no butter or oil in it and nothing to brown with; frying is what cooks it, and dry heat gives you a pale, tough dumpling. If you will not deep-fry, drop the batter in tablespoons into a quarter inch of hot oil in a skillet and turn them like fritters — not the same thing, but edible.