What a great word: chowder. “Chowdah,” my mother always said, flipping it off the roof of her mouth with gusto. A hodgepodge of flavors and textures, chowder was probably invented on the coasts of northwestern France and southwestern England in the 16th century, a make-do meal for fishermen that combined the day’s catch with what was in the garden or on shipboard. The word’s origin is thought perhaps to be chaudière, French for large iron pot, but another possible root is jowter, Cornish for fishmonger. When ships returned home from months at sea, the town’s welcome celebration included a communal chaudière, into which each fisherman contributed part of his haul.
Fishing as far out as the Grand Banks, early explorers probably took their catch ashore in Newfoundland, and a stew was a smart way to cook shellfish and fish with shipboard provisions. Early European settlers found that Native Americans were already making chowders with shellfish. Indeed, in some areas clams and oysters were eaten in such prodigious quantity that you can still find oyster shell mounds piled 10 feet high — there’s one in my neighborhood in Mattapoisett, hundreds of years old, from when the Wampanoags summered there. The Pilgrims, who turned their noses up at shellfish, fed clams and mussels to their hogs, calling shellfish “the meanest of God’s blessings.”
The first printed chowder recipe in Massachusetts was in the Boston Evening Post in 1751 (seasoned with salt, pepper, marjoram, savory, thyme, and parsley), and chowder remains a New England staple. Interestingly, the 1896 Boston Cooking School Cook Book had only one recipe for clam chowder, and it was prepared with the traditional cream base. Later editions included Manhattan Chowder (water-based, with tomatoes) and Rhode Island Clam Chowder (clear broth, with bacon).
When my parents married in 1952, they spent their honeymoon camping on the beach in Provincetown, where they kept a pot of chowder continually on the fire, replenishing it with each day’s catch. Though quahogs (large hard-shell clams) are the traditional chowder clam because they are large and tough (quahogs are never served raw), any type of clam and most kinds of fish can be used in a chowder, which improves with age. For those who haven’t cooked much with fish, a one-pot dish is a great introduction. Rustic and flexible, chowders shine with flavor. They are also profoundly simple, liberating the cook for other pleasures.
Rustic and flexible, chowders shine with flavor.
Serves 8
New England chowders are traditionally made with quahogs — large hard-shell clams that are native to the eastern shores of North America and particularly plentiful near Cape Cod and the Islands. Littleneck clams, which are smaller hard-shell clams, would also be tasty in this dish.
“Chowder breathes reassurance. It steams consolation.”
— Clementine Paddleford
Serves 4–6
Rhode Islanders prefer a clear-broth chowder to the traditional “white” chowder, as they deign to call chowders across the state line. If you’ve never tried a clear-broth chowder, rush thee to the kitchen: it’s awesome. From Galilee to Warwick, Rhode Island Broth Chowder is dished up in schools, at diners, in pubs. Indeed, I learned the secret from a public school line cook who moonlights at an oyster bar in Jamestown: start by rendering fat from salt pork and then make a roux by adding flour to the fat. The flavors are strong and pronounced, and I think that a clam broth is better than chicken soup for a cold. I like it with a lot of black pepper and a few dashes of Tabasco sauce.
A small state with big flavor, Rhode Island is home to stuffies (stuffed quahogs) and Del’s Lemonade, not to mention clam cakes, a masterful street snack. The first colony to declare its independence and the last to ratify the Constitution, Little Rhody insists on calling a milkshake a cabinet, a sub a grinder, and their signature chowder a broth.
A mere 37 miles from east to west, the Ocean State has a 420-mile coastline of deep bays and low barrier beaches, with 33 islands in Narragansett Bay, an estuary that reaches two-thirds of the way up the state. The fact that no Rhode Islander is more than 30 minutes from the water informs their culinary sensibilities, to be sure.
In the early 1600s, about 4,000 Narragansetts and 1,500 Wampanoags lived in the area now called Rhode Island. Seafood was a staple; they caught striped bass with bone hooks and nets and gathered quahogs, oysters, and other shellfish from shallow waters.
In the 1630s, Puritan theologian Roger Williams fled persecution in Massachusetts and founded Providence. More European settlers arrived, and by the early 19th century, English, Irish, and Scottish settlers were arriving in droves, followed later by Portuguese, Italian, and Polish immigrants. They brought their food heritages with them when they came to work in the mills, creating a vibrant and diverse food culture in a small state that many motorists breeze through on their way from New York to the Martha’s Vineyard. Meanwhile, the million residents of the Ocean State tuck in and stubbornly maintain their food heritage, tradition, terminology, and predilections in a small area.
Serves 6
Thank goodness for secretaries. When John F. Kennedy was president, a disabled girl wrote to him asking what he liked to eat. “Please reply to her,” Kennedy’s secretary wrote in a memo to the president. “She will be extremely happy. Do not mention anything in the letter about her handicap please!” We have this chowder recipe as a result, thanks to the John F. Kennedy library archives in Boston.
“Stepping to the kitchen door, I uttered the word ‘cod’ with great emphasis, and resumed my seat. In a few moments the savoury steam came forth again, but with a different flavor, and in good time a fine cod-chowder was placed before us. . . . Fishiest of all fishy places was the Try Pots, which well-deserved its name; for the pots there were always boiling chowders. Chowder for breakfast, and chowder for dinner, and chowder for supper, till you began to look for fish-bones coming through your clothes.”
— Herman Melville,
writing about a Nantucket chowder house in Moby-Dick (1851)
Serves 4–6
Old Bay seasoning was created in the Chesapeake Bay area in 1939, when creator Gustav Brunn fled Nazi Germany and settled in the region. Old Bay is used quite a bit in Navy ship galleys (probably due to the strong Naval presence in Maryland), and the seasoning is delicious in all kinds of crab dishes and with other seafood as well. It’s named after the Old Bay passenger ship that plied the Chesapeake in the early 1900s. In this chowder, you could substitute lobster or fish for the crab.
When the cook made chowder aboard a square-rigger, the ingredients were standard ship fare: salt pork, fresh or salt cod, and sea biscuits. (Potatoes were added later.) Sea biscuits (also called hardtack) were the forerunner to Crown Pilot crackers (the ones you find in diners in the noisy cellophane bags), a ubiquitous ingredient in a steaming bowl of New England chowder for decades.
Made by Nabisco, the Crown Pilot was the food giant’s oldest recipe, acquired when they bought a Newburyport bakery that had been making the recipe since 1792. When demand for the cracker waned in the 1990s, little did Nabisco’s bean counters realize the anger they’d unleash among independent-minded, tradition-bound Yankees when they discontinued the cracker (along with 400 other non-performing foods) in 1996. Maybe they also didn’t realize what a compelling story it made: a little cracker, beloved by the underdog, abandoned by a multinational food giant. People thought it was a pretty crummy move on Nabisco’s part.
Ground zero was Chebeague Island (population: 350) in Maine’s Casco Bay, where folks circulated a “Save Our Pilot Cracker” petition. Angry chowder lovers flooded the Nabisco Customer Comment Hotline. Humorist Tim Sample placed a call to CBS’s Sunday Morning, and soon Maine islanders were venting on national TV, singing “My Bonny Lies over the Ocean” before the cameras with the refrain, “Bring back! Bring back! Bring back my Pilot crackers to me, to me!” As one islander explained, Saltines are fine for sardines, but not for chowder.
Nabisco resumed production in 1997, though their interest was half-baked; after the company was acquired by Kraft, the Pilot cracker was grounded in 2008. Fortunately, Westminster oyster crackers are a reasonable substitute.
If your recipe calls for peeling and deveining shrimp before cooking, remove the shells (including the crunchy covering on the shrimp tails) by cracking them with your fingers and pulling them off. Devein the shrimp by running a sharp knife down the back of each shrimp to remove the black streak, and then wash under cold water. Shrimp-cleaning tools that split the shell and remove the vein in one motion are handy if you eat a lot of shrimp.
Serves 8
A bisque is a creamy soup made with shellfish; using the shrimp shells in the cooking process is a classic French technique to extract maximum flavor. Here, bourbon enhances the shrimp without overpowering it, and rice replaces some of the cream traditional in bisque. This bisque is a wonderful start to any meal, as it is not heavy and has a silky mouthfeel.
Up until the late 1800s, recipes were pretty loose (“one glass of flour” is one of my favorite measurements from an 1825 cookbook). Fannie Farmer of Boston aimed to change the way people cooked at home when she took over as director of the Boston Cooking-School in 1894, and her Original 1896 Boston Cooking-School Cook Book (essentially a revised edition of a book written by her predecessor) became a best-seller, emphasizing “scientific knowledge,” standardized measurements, and level measures. Recipes became formulas, and her book, which coincided with the rise of the middle class, was enormously influential — women were staying home and wanted to become professional homemakers. Ladies like my great-aunt Elizabeth, who went to Wellesley in the late 1800s and taught school until she married, were given a creative outlet for using their brains at home by elevating domestic chores to a science.
So influential was Farmer that her publisher eventually put her name in the title, though she left the school in 1902 to open Miss Farmer’s School of Cookery, a new kind of school aimed at training housewives rather than professional chefs. Ironically, in elevating domestic arts to a science, she inadvertently bolstered the notion that women’s work was at home, and intimidated the hell out of us, leading generations of household cooks to abandon a recipe if they didn’t have a precise ingredient, or slavishly follow directions to the letter, burying their cooking instinct and trusting someone else’s recipe too much (“Why didn’t it work? I followed the directions!”).
I’m here to tell you that chowders are forgiving — they were made aboard ship and on the beach, after all. If you don’t have one fish or shellfish, substitute another. Don’t have thyme? Use oregano. Stay loose, and have fun with it. Shake it up.
“I cannot not sail.”
— E. B. White
Serves 4
This silky, smoky corn-and-shrimp soup has a back-of-the-mouth tingle from the chipotles, and lip heat from the cayenne, but the milk and cream balance the piquancy. With chiles you have the option of cranking up or dialing down the heat by including or discarding the seeds and membrane.
Preheat the oven to 350°F (180°C). Remove the papery outer husk of a whole head of garlic and slice off the top 1⁄4 inch of the head (making sure to keep the cloves intact). Rub the exterior with olive oil, wrap in foil, and roast for 45 minutes. The garlic is done when it’s soft and easy to squeeze. When cooled, squeeze out each clove.
Serves 4
Imagine, a creamy soup with no cream. Bay scallops are mild and sweet, and a delightful study in contrasts — firm yet pliant, with a refined texture. While it’s not necessary to serve this soup in a shallow bowl, it makes a fetching presentation.
Bay scallops are smaller than sea scallops (about 1⁄2 inch in diameter as opposed to 11⁄2 inches in diameter), and prized for their tenderness and sweetness. Sea scallops are chewier and cheaper — good for a bouillabaise or other stew. Although scallops, like everything else, are available year-round, they come into season during the colder months, from fall through winter.
If you don’t bring home your own harvest, ask at the fish counter for “dry” scallops, which are in their natural state. Wet scallops have been soaked in a chemical preservative to extend their shelf life; plumped up with water, they are not as flavorful or delicate, and won’t sear as beautifully as dry scallops. Dry scallops have a pure, more concentrated flavor and are mild and delicate.
Serves 2
In New York City, where there are many epicurean attractions, the Grand Central Oyster Bar may be among the finest. Chefs have been cooking oyster pan roasts with style since Grand Central Terminal opened in 1913. On a board above the bar, the names of towns indicate where the oysters hail from — Wellfleet, Wianno, Watch Hill, and other inlets familiar to those who worship the cult of the oyster on the swivel stools at the bar.
An oyster pan roast is an exquisite winter meal — rich, satisfying, a little decadent, with a briny intensity. It’s traditional to add celery salt, though I find that the oyster brine makes this dish salty enough. With just six ingredients, each one matters: Worcestershire sauce balances the brine, and the chile sauce, which was exotic in 1913, adds tang, as well as a pinkish tint to the silky stew. It helps to heat your soup bowls before you begin, and use a high-quality clam juice if you don’t make your own. Half-and-half is a fine alternative to heavy cream.
Mussels have a bad rap as being finicky, but they are easy to find, clean, and prepare — “sweet onyx jewels,” as one fisherman told me. Anchored on rocks, pilings, mud flats, and other mussels, they can be found on islands, inshore bays, and other protected areas. Unlike clams or quahogs, which are best foraged in a bathing suit or wetsuit, mussels can be picked onshore year-round with your shoes on. Mussels, like clams and most bivalves, are sold, caught, and cooked alive.
If you’re an armchair forager, go to the fish market and buy mussels the same day you want to cook them. Look for ones that are kept on ice, with glistening shells, which indicates moisture. We’ve all seen those disgusting dried-up shells, and inside the shriveled dry mussels that look like they’ve been dead longer than my great-grandparents. Worse, if they’re dried up, they may actually be dead. Avoid a mussel that looks dehydrated, or whose shell is open.
Whether you’ve bought them or foraged for them, when you get home, put them in a bowl or on a baking sheet covered with a wet towel (the goal is to keep them moist but let them breathe) in the refrigerator. Clean them within an hour of cooking.
If you’ve bought them at the market, they are clean. If you’ve foraged for them, you need to clean them — not a big deal. Soak them in fresh water for 20 to 30 minutes (no longer or they’ll die), and then drain in a colander. Tear or cut off their “beards” and scrape the shells under cold running water with a stiff brush or knife to remove dirt and barnacles. Discard mussels that are chipped or broken.
Mussels, like clams, will gape open when they’re dead. But not all open bivalves are dead. Tap open mussels with another mussel, or try to squeeze them gently shut. If one still stays open, pitch it; it’s not faking it.
Serves 4
This garlicky fish stew from Provence doesn’t rely on any particular type of fish. Use what’s fresh and firm — halibut and shrimp, sea bass or red mullet, monkfish and clams — the choice is yours. The garlic mayonnaise (aioli) thickens and enriches this iconic stew. Serve with crusty bread.
Makes 1 cup
Aioli is a mayonnaise-like Provençal sauce that’s delicious with grilled seafood, fried fish, grilled meats, and vegetables. You can change the recipe slightly by adding a tablespoon of chopped fresh herbs at the end — it’s awesome either way. Devotees of the traditional mortar-and-pestle method think it creates a beautifully textured sauce, and brings out a richer garlic aroma, but no one will flog you if you’re short on time and resort to a food processor or blender (I do!).
If you bought clams at the market, they’re clean. But if you bought them from a guy on the dock at Vineyard Haven who had them in a bucket of seawater, ask him if he’s cleaned them. And if you’ve canoed out to a sandy spit in your bathing suit and spent the afternoon at low tide in the muck digging clams, you definitely want to clean them. Now what do you do?
Bring them home in a bucket submerged in several inches of seawater. (If you’re in a car driving home and it’s scorching hot, put the clams in a cooler and cover with seawater.) Once home, quickly scrub the outside of the shells with a stiff brush under cold running water — fresh water kills clams — to get rid of the mud and grit (or scrub them in a second bucket of seawater). Hard-shelled clams don’t have much grit; it’s the soft-shelled clams you need to purge, and this is how you do it:
Put them in a container and submerge them again in seawater — either the real thing, or make up a mixture of 3 tablespoons of sea salt (see? sea salt really does come in handy) per liter of water for at least an hour and up to 20 hours (longer than that they’ll suffocate and die when the oxygen runs out in the water). If they are particularly gritty, you may want to change the water.
Serves 6–8
There’s a large Portuguese population in southeastern Massachusetts and Rhode Island, dating back to the early 1800s, when Cape Verdean and Azorean immigrants arrived on whaling ships as the industry grew and needed more crew. By 1870, immigrants from Portugal and the Madeira Islands followed to work in the mills. The Portuguese culinary influence is felt everywhere — from Portuguese sweet bread in bakeries to linguiça at the grocery stores to kale soup dished out as street food at Catholic feasts.
With ingredients similar to other Mediterranean countries (olive oil, onions, garlic, bay leaf, paprika), the holy trinity of Portuguese cooking is meat, poultry, and seafood. Linguiça is a smoke-cured Portuguese pork sausage seasoned with garlic, pepper, and paprika. This soup is wonderful sopped up with hot crusty garlic bread or a Portuguese sweet roll. You could easily incorporate seafood by tossing in a few handfuls of clams 5 minutes or so before the end of the cooking process.
Growing up, we always referred to our summer places as “the cottage.” My cousin’s cottage was on the WeWeantic, my friend’s was on Hamilton Beach, another friend’s was on Briarwood Beach, and we all knew whose we were referring to. We never said “our cottage,” or “Maureen’s cottage,” or “Doug’s cottage”; it was simply “the cottage.”
Even recently, a friend wrote me about someone who visited his mother years ago at “the cottage,” and it immediately brought me back to his family’s unheated bungalow on a bluff overlooking Parkwood Beach. They haven’t owned their cottages in decades, but when my cousin Doug talks about “the cottage” I know he’s referring to his family’s, and when he asks me about Thanksgiving at “the cottage” this year, I know he’s referring to mine.
Seasoned summer places that run deep in a family, sometimes for generations, have a way of doing that. They are so fixed in our kindred memory and spirit that they don’t need pronouns to be understood. They become shorthand for a place, a time, a state of mind.
