The regional table / Massachusetts
New England Clam Chowder
Fannie Farmer held the clam liquor back to the last second because it curdled her milk. Put it in first instead, hold the milk to the end, and the problem stops existing.
The document is The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book, Fannie Merritt Farmer, Little, Brown and Company, 1896. The chowders close out Chapter IX, pages 127 to 129, five of them in a row, and Clam Chowder is the fourth. Her list is a quart of clams, an inch-and-a-half cube of fat salt pork, one sliced onion, four cups of diced potatoes, a tablespoon of salt, four tablespoons of butter, four cups of scalded milk and eight common crackers. No cream. No bacon. No thyme, no bay, no wine. The book never uses the name New England clam chowder at all — the recipe is headed simply Clam Chowder, and printed directly above it on the same page is Connecticut Chowder, which is the same chowder with stewed and strained tomatoes in place of the milk, set down without a word of argument.
Two things in her method are worth knowing before you cook a modern one. She builds the pot in layers rather than making a roux: parboiled potatoes on the bottom, the finely chopped hard part of the clams, salt and pepper, flour dredged generously over the lot, then the rest of the potatoes, more salt and pepper, more flour, and two and a half cups of boiling water over the top. And she keeps the clam liquor out of the pot until the very last second, reheated and thickened separately with butter and flour, for a reason she states plainly in a line under the recipe: the clam water has a tendency to cause the milk to separate. This version inverts that. The potatoes cook in the clam broth from the start, which puts clam flavor through the whole pot instead of leaving it on the surface, and the milk goes in at the end and off the boil, where it cannot break. The other change is smaller and harder to give up: her crackers are split, soaked in cold milk and stirred in, so they thicken the chowder. Mine go on top, dry.
Why this version works
Salt pork, not bacon. Farmer cuts fat salt pork small, tries it out, fries the onion in the fat and strains that fat into the stewpan, leaving the scraps behind entirely. Bacon puts smoke into a dish that has none in the 1896 book, and smoke sits on top of clam and flattens it. Use unsmoked salt pork, and keep the crisp scraps for the top of the bowl rather than throwing them out as she does.
The clam broth is the stock. Nothing else in the pot tastes of the sea, so every cup of plain water is a cup of dilution. One cup of water under four pounds of clams comes back as two to three cups of concentrated broth once they have opened and given up their own liquor, and the potatoes should cook in all of it.
Flour early, milk late, no boil. Her flour is dredged over the potato layers and her chowder boils three minutes after the milk goes in. A roux cooked in the pork fat does the same thickening more evenly, and the starch coats the milk proteins enough that they hold together against the salt and acid of the clam broth. Past a bare simmer they stop holding, so bring the finished pot to about 180°F and take it off.
The clams go back in at the end. Farmer splits each clam into its hard part, chopped fine and cooked through the whole chowder, and its soft part, added near the finish with the milk. Hard-shell clams offer no such split — the whole meat is firm and it turns to eraser in minutes — so all of it goes in at the end for two minutes of heat and no more.
