Moby-Dick

CLAM CHOWDER

In the early 1970s my dad’s parents bought a house on a tree-lined stretch of Hussey Street on Nantucket. Like most of the houses nearby, it had once been the house of a ship’s captain. This one in particular supposedly belonged to a famous whaling captain. My grandparents converted it into an inn that they called the Grey Goose, where they spent many of their happiest years. My dad would spend summers there, working as a garbage man and picking up odd handyman jobs.

In those days, Nantucket was already populated by the superwealthy, especially in the summertime, but it was the old, proper, New England kind of wealth that nobody talked about openly or flashed around. My grandfather was able to buy the inn on a high school principal’s salary, which would be absolutely unheard of today. When my grandmother passed away in 1980, my grandfather sold the inn for next to nothing, too heartbroken to haggle and desperate not to be living alone in a place so much associated with their life as a couple.

Despite the fact that my grandfather sold the Grey Goose, we still went to Nantucket every summer when I was a kid. We rented the same cottage year after year and spent long days hunting for crabs, playing paddleball, and swimming in the chilly, black ocean. At night, my dad read Moby-Dick to my sisters and me, telling us that Captain Ahab was actually the old whaling captain who had lived on Hussey Street. My dad was always happiest on these vacations. I think he felt his parents’ spirits most clearly on the island.

When I was ten or eleven we stopped going to Nantucket. The island had changed to a point that my dad barely recognized it anymore, and the cottage that we always rented was sold and knocked down—it felt like the closing of a chapter.

It was nostalgia and a longing for that place and time that led me to pick up my dad’s worn copy of Moby-Dick the summer before I entered college. I was astounded to discover how much of it I still knew by heart from all of the summers spent listening to it before bed. Herman Melville is so widely associated with Nantucket, and he so vividly captures the spirit of it in Moby-Dick, that it’s nearly impossible to believe that when Moby-Dick was published in 1851 he had never set foot on the island.

Although Melville didn’t know Nantucket firsthand, he knew the East Coast and the whaling life well enough from personal experience to write the book convincingly. His life at sea started in the summer of 1839, when he was twenty years old, as a “green hand” for a ship sailing from New York to Liverpool. In 1841 he joined the crew of a whaling ship called the Acushnet and sailed with them for eighteen months before deserting the ship in the Marquesas Islands, where he lived among the Typee natives for three weeks. He sailed with two other whaling ships after the Acushnet, partaking in mutinies and spending time in jail along the way.

Given my view of the world, I can’t help but wonder if part of the reason for Melville’s desertion and mutiny on these whaling voyages was the state of the meals on board. The food on whaling ships was often close to inedible—moldy, hard biscuits with bug-infested molasses and heavily salted dried horse meat were common fare, and there was little variety. It’s no wonder that Melville, upon deserting the Acushnet, was so happy to be with the Typee, who ate fresh fruit, roasted suckling pigs, and even whole raw fish—bones, eyeballs, and all.

In the opening chapters of Moby-Dick, Ishmael spends his final nights before setting sail aboard the Pequod at the Try Pots Inn on Nantucket, preparing for his journey at sea. Part of this preparation, it seems, is enjoying one final good meal before the inevitable culinary wasteland that awaits him at sea, where “all your meals for three years and more are snugly stowed in casks, and your bill of fare is immutable.”

The chowder served to him by the innkeeper, Mrs. Hussey, is so good he spends the rest of the chapter discussing it. The chowder “was made of small juicy clams, scarcely bigger than hazel nuts, mixed with pounded ship biscuit, and salted pork cut up into little flakes; the whole enriched with butter, and plentifully seasoned with pepper and salt.” Besides the pounded ship biscuit—also known as hardtack, this was used as a thickening agent in the days when heavy cream wasn’t as readily available—this chowder sounds just like the soup I grew up eating in New England. (I like to remind my New York friends that even Melville, who was from Manhattan, was clearly a fan of the New England style of clam chowder.)

MOBY-DICK

Clam Chowder

My dad’s chowder is one of the things I look forward to most about being home, especially in the summertime when the seafood is freshest and the corn is extra sweet. He generally uses a spicy Portuguese sausage called linguiça, but that can be hard to find, so we’ll stick to salt pork here and add a heavy dose of Tabasco at the end.

Serves 6

7 pounds littleneck clams

¼ cup sea salt

1 teaspoon unsalted butter

4 ounces salt pork or bacon, cut into ¼-inch pieces

1 large yellow onion, diced

2 celery ribs, diced

2 tablespoons all-purpose flour

Kernels removed from 2 ears sweet corn

4 medium-size starchy potatoes (such as Idaho or russet), scrubbed and cubed

1 bay leaf

Leaves of 4 thyme sprigs

1 cup heavy cream

Tabasco sauce

Kosher salt

Freshly ground black pepper

Oyster crackers, for serving

The night before you are going to make the chowder (or at least 4 hours before), place the clams in a large pot, cover them with water until they are submerged, add the sea salt, and put the pot, covered, in the refrigerator. If you can’t fit a pot this big in your refrigerator, you can use very cold water and allow the clams to sit in the salted water at room temperature for 4 hours. This will allow the clams to spit out the sand that they are holding inside their shells so that you don’t end up with a gritty chowder.

The next day, or after 4 hours, remove the clams and rinse them with fresh cold water. Rinse the pot of any grit or salt, return the clams to the pot, and add 4 cups fresh water. Bring the water to a boil over medium heat and boil until the clams just begin to open up, 8 to 10 minutes.

As soon as they open, remove the meat from the shells over the pot, to make sure that any juice that comes out ends up back in the stock. Discard the shells and set the clams aside.

Pour the liquid that you boiled the clams in through a coffee filter or double layer of cheesecloth into a separate bowl. You should have about 5 cups of clam stock.

Rinse out the pot again and melt the butter in it over low heat. Add the salt pork and cook until all of the fat renders out and the meat is lightly crispy, about 7 minutes. Add the diced onion and celery and cook until the onion is translucent, about 5 minutes.

Whisk in the flour and cook until the flour is lightly toasted and smells fragrant, like a biscuit, 1 to 2 minutes. Whisk in the clam stock a little bit at a time until it is all incorporated. Add the corn kernels, potatoes, bay leaf, and thyme and simmer until the potatoes are fork-tender, 10 to 12 minutes.

Add the clams and whisk in the cream. Season with Tabasco, kosher salt, and pepper to taste, and serve with oyster crackers.