A History of Chowder: Four Centuries of a New England Meal
The evolution of New England’s famous culinary classic: chowder, in all its mouthwatering varieties—from the authors of Massachusetts Cranberry Culture.
 
New England’s culinary history is marked by a varying array of chowders. Early forms were thick and layered, but the adaptability of this beloved recipe has allowed for a multitude of tasty preparations to emerge. Thick or thin, brimming with fish or clams or corn, chowder springs up throughout the region in as many distinctive varieties as there are ports of call, yet always remains the quintessential expression of New England cuisine. Food writers and chowder connoisseurs Robert S. Cox and Jacob Walker dish out the history, flavors, and significance of every New Englander’s favorite comfort food.
 
Includes photos!
1127917506
A History of Chowder: Four Centuries of a New England Meal
The evolution of New England’s famous culinary classic: chowder, in all its mouthwatering varieties—from the authors of Massachusetts Cranberry Culture.
 
New England’s culinary history is marked by a varying array of chowders. Early forms were thick and layered, but the adaptability of this beloved recipe has allowed for a multitude of tasty preparations to emerge. Thick or thin, brimming with fish or clams or corn, chowder springs up throughout the region in as many distinctive varieties as there are ports of call, yet always remains the quintessential expression of New England cuisine. Food writers and chowder connoisseurs Robert S. Cox and Jacob Walker dish out the history, flavors, and significance of every New Englander’s favorite comfort food.
 
Includes photos!
13.49 In Stock
A History of Chowder: Four Centuries of a New England Meal

A History of Chowder: Four Centuries of a New England Meal

A History of Chowder: Four Centuries of a New England Meal

A History of Chowder: Four Centuries of a New England Meal

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Overview

The evolution of New England’s famous culinary classic: chowder, in all its mouthwatering varieties—from the authors of Massachusetts Cranberry Culture.
 
New England’s culinary history is marked by a varying array of chowders. Early forms were thick and layered, but the adaptability of this beloved recipe has allowed for a multitude of tasty preparations to emerge. Thick or thin, brimming with fish or clams or corn, chowder springs up throughout the region in as many distinctive varieties as there are ports of call, yet always remains the quintessential expression of New England cuisine. Food writers and chowder connoisseurs Robert S. Cox and Jacob Walker dish out the history, flavors, and significance of every New Englander’s favorite comfort food.
 
Includes photos!

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781614233503
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing SC
Publication date: 01/23/2019
Series: American Palate
Sold by: Barnes & Noble
Format: eBook
Pages: 131
Sales rank: 885,916
File size: 2 MB

About the Author

Jacob Walker spends most of his time along the coast of Massachusetts. He is the creator of the New England Chowder Compendium, a nationally recognized project at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst devoted to examining all things chowder.Rob Cox spends far too little time along the coast of Massachusetts. A former paleontologist and molecular biologist, he has a doctorate in history from the University of Michigan and works at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. He is author of Body and Soul: A Sympathetic History of American Spiritualism (Charlottesville, 2003) and editor of and contributor to The Shortest and Most Convenient Route: Lewis and Clark in Context (Philadelphia, 2004).

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

Chowder Begins

For New Englanders, and those who would be ones, chowder is a sea swell of the soul. A bowl of chowder (never a cup) evokes a forgotten day years ago, a slanted shaft of light on a wooden table, a stove-top pot steaming as the languorous hours of an autumn afternoon drift toward revelation. Chowder recalls a breeze-swept shore, a celebration of friends and walkers-by decked out in rain gear and wool, seasoned with salt and sand and shocks of briny kelp. For Henry David Thoreau, chowder was the culmination of a day in his beloved Concord woods; for Herman Melville, it sang of the friendship of unlikely shipmates discovering the "fishiest of all fishy places," a weathered tavern in the byways of Nantucket. A simmering bowl, a shore-side meal, chowder is sustenance in its most elemental form — sustenance of body and mind — a marker of hearth and home, community, family and culture. So many liquid shades of recall, chowder charts the shoals and eddies of the New England shore and points the way home.

This simple dish — this simple congeries of simple things, cooked simply — is so basic that it is tempting to say what it is not rather than what it is. It is not, for example, a dish for the refined of palate, a bowl for the finicky, the fancy or fussy. It is neither the dainty fare of the elite nor some exotic swaddling thing newly arrived on our national doorstep. It is no adventurous foray into the nether regions of the food chain. Chowder shuns the aesthetic and the summery challenge of spice and heat in favor of wintry grays and whites. It opts for savory over sweet, a layered pot over layered flavor. Salt and pepper, potatoes and onion, pork and fish, cream and hard crackers — there is nothing nouvelle here.

If chowder is elegant, then, it is only so in its simplicity, in its assertive lack of assertiveness. Yet somehow, these scant half dozen ingredients combined have cast a spell over generations of New Englanders. For all its unassuming nature, chowder is defended as fiercely in the region as any national dish has ever been by any ravenous horde. Ask a Red Sox fan about the Yankees, or the Patriots about the Jets, and you will receive a taste of what New Englanders feel about the degenerate soup endemic to Manhattan. New Englanders are bred in the bone with a favorite joint, a favored recipe and a revered chowder master. It is our legacy, our collective memory. In all its varied forms, it is a dish of proportion, substance and balance and can no more be reduced to just another seafood stew than a fine French bread can be reduced to a mere sum of flour, salt, yeast and water. For New Englanders, it has become more than a dish. In its simplest forms, and most elaborate, it is to the region as the madeleine was to Marcel Proust — a way of remembering and experiencing a common past, and sometimes creating it.

Food, as the anthropologist Mary Douglas has written, is so much more than the sum of nutrition, economics and taste; it penetrates deeply into the "moral and social intentions of individuals," shaping the world as we know it and defining our relations with others. Our beliefs and practices about food (foodways, to use the anthropological term) bring our peculiar notions about our culture into high relief, symbolically representing what we hold close to the heart and what we reject as beyond the pale. Joining together in the preparation, cooking and sharing of meals and memories helps us to see and sense the most intimate bonds that unite us. It clarifies the values we share and our particular roles within our circle of family and friends and the community at large. A simple phrase like "break bread" surpasses the words themselves; it conjures a world of relationships, a new sense of the emotional and personal expectations that connect us. To keep kosher, to eat vegan, to say grace and even to reheat a TV dinner in the microwave is cultural shorthand for much deeper sets of commitments, and which course we follow in our cuisine reveals as much about us as consumers — as family or community — as volumes of ethnography ever can. Every action has its significance to the cook and consumer, whether separating meat from dairy or peeling back the plastic cover from a plastic tray.

Foodways, in fact, may be among the most important means by which the members of a community come to understand their place in the world. As food historians Etta M. Madden and Martha L. Finch write, foodways are the means by which people "achieve their ideals" and then "display those ideals to themselves and outsiders." In the modern United States, where a meal can be little more than a thin sandwich in the vacant hours of an afternoon, the act of sitting around a table together, breaking bread, becomes a powerful statement about those we love and those who love us. This is what we long for, what we value; this is who we are.

Madden and Finch argue that foodways resonate in four distinct registers. Symbolically, foodways represent and communicate the values dear to us and our community. Functionally, they help create bonds within and around a community, providing a means of material and ideological negotiation with the outside world. Mnemonically, they connect our past to our present and future, creating the impression of an unbroken chain. Finally, dynamically, foodways enact and reflect change in a community's social values. In these ways, a simple meal can evoke subtle and even conflicting sets of meanings. For some Brazilians, as Madden and Finch note, eating a quarter pounder with cheese at McDonalds may reflect "the displacement of local values and practices by U.S. imperialism," but at another seat in the same restaurant, other Brazilians might imagine themselves "symbolically ingesting all they see as positive about the United States." Foodways, according to Madden and Finch, "help members continuously create a particular world and define their relations to the larger world in which they live."

Symbolically, functionally, mnemonically or dynamically, as we will see, chowder has become a powerful means for New Englanders to define themselves as a community, a rich community with a deep past and values that distinguish our region from all others. And yet, chowder suggests a strange thing about New England. While the dish has long been made here, while it has a close association with our people and climate, it only became entrenched in our souls when that feeling of community began to fray. And peril is a feeling long familiar to the New England mind. Even while the Puritans held political and social sway here, they feared that New England had fallen away from its founding ideals, from the tightly knit social fabric that our earliest immigrants had so carefully woven. In the generation of Cotton Mather — and often since — New England ministers railed against our declension from godly purity and social unity, and a century later, writers like Harriet Beecher Stowe picked up the thread, yearning for a New England before the coming of the telegraph and rail, before steam power and steam-powered ideas changed our moral fiber.

In her novel Oldtown Folks, Stowe remembered the days of that New England past, when the residents of hamlets and villages from the Atlantic shore to the Berkshire Hills lived as "part and parcel," she wrote, "of a great picture of the society in which he live[d] and act[ed]." She was convinced that those times were evaporating in the harsh sunlight of the modern day. Through her writing, she sought to cling to those "ante-railroad times," the old times when "our own hard, rocky, sterile New England was a sort of half Hebrew theocracy, half ultra-democratic republic of little villages, separated by a pathless ocean from all the civilization and refinement of the Old World, forgotten and unnoticed, and yet burning like live coals under this obscurity with all the fervid activity of an intense, newly kindled, peculiar, and individual life." Those times were already gone, or nearly so, and she longed for that pure and simple past:

For that simple, pastoral germ-state of society is a thing forever gone. Never again shall we see that union of perfect repose in regard to outward surroundings and outward life with that intense activity of the inward and intellectual world, that made New England, at this time, the vigorous, germinating seed-bed for all that has since been developed of politics, laws, letters, and theology, through New England to America, and through America to the world. The hurry of railroads, and the rush and roar of business that now fill it, would have prevented that germinating process. It was necessary that there should be a period like that we describe, when villages were each a separate little democracy, shut off by rough roads and forests from the rest of the world, organized round the church and school as a common centre, and formed by the minister and the schoolmaster.

In a society in which the bonds of community are maintained largely by face-to-face contact, nostalgia is unnecessary, but as those intimacies fade, a yearning for the symbols of the past gnaws deep into the psyche. Chowder is just one of those symbols to which New Englanders attached themselves; just as some were drawn to the ancient houses and small villages of the colonial revival movement and others cleaved themselves to the imagined arts and crafts of an imagined past, so many New Englanders have reached for the chowder pot and the olden recipes that sustained their forefathers. This is not nostalgia, though it is like it. Chowder plays a pivotal role in creating a sense of community through the fierce defense of the "true" or "authentic" and through the implicit meanings of simple ingredients prepared with special care in a special way. Chowder evokes what Madden and Finch call the "visceral memories that provide feelings of familiarity, comfort, and continuity," and the rituals surrounding its consumption — the chowder party — provide an opportunity to learn what it is to behave like a proper New Englander and to show who we are. It is the ultimate comfort food: it is comfort food for a culture.

Harriet Beecher Stowe knew about chowder, but as we shall see, the history of this simple and essential dish became the past that generations of New Englanders imagined, even as it gained a foothold in the present and a place for the future.

CHOWDER HAS AN IDENTITY

As a general proposition, a history of the Reformation ought to begin with a proper discussion of just what was being reformed, and if we were to set our sights on writing about a revolution, we might well wish to know who was revolting. In the same vein, it would be a fine idea to begin a discussion of chowder with an introduction to where it originated and what it is. That we will not provide. As it turns out, neither reforming the western religious tradition nor casting off the shackles of tyranny present a problem quite as thorny as the chowder pot. Chowder simply defies any logic but its own. Through time, the dish has metamorphosed from rough-hewn shipboard roots into versions fitted out for more refined, though seldom genteel, tables. Subtly but surely, the ingredients have evolved through time, as has the manner in which they are handled and the manner in which they are received, and even within New England itself, different regions have followed their own chowdery paths, with some, like wayward Connecticut, venturing too far for many would-be purists and others hewing close to the trunk of the ancestral tree. To define what chowder is turns out to be not such an easy task.

To be sure, there are some distinctive aspects of chowder that have barely changed through the years. The earliest published recipe for the dish, a poetical piece published in the Boston Evening Post on September 23, 1751, is very much recognizable as a chowder, even to modern eyes, though it might look and taste like a distant relative to the modern palate:

First lay some Onions to keep the Pork from burning,
Because in chouder there can be no turning;
Then lay some Pork in slices very thin,
This you in Chouder always must begin.
Next lay some Fish oer crossways very nice Then season well with Pepper, Salt and Spice;
Parsley, Sweet-Marjoram, Savory and Thyme,
Then Biscuit next which must be soak'd some Time.
Thus your Foundation laid, you will be able To raise a chouder, high as Tower of Babel;
For by reapeating o'er the Same again,
You may make Chouder for a thousand Men.
Last Bottle of Claret, with Water eno' to smother 'em,
You'l have a Mess which some call Omnium gather 'em.

Like most early chowders, the Post dish was thick and layered. Starting with a base of salt pork rendered to provide fat and flavor, and onions to lend zest, it climbed through as many strata of fish and biscuit as the pot would allow before being doused with just enough water to cover the whole. Herbs of various sorts, wine or occasionally other flavorings could be added to the pot to lend a little kiss, but every bowl was a hefty bowl, even without two of the ingredients that define chowder for most New Englanders today: potato and milk. And then there were the clams. More about these later. Surprisingly, throughout the history of chowder, the only ingredients common to all — or nearly all — are salt pork (or its equivalent) and to a lesser degree onions. Even these lonely chorus players cannot always be relied upon.

In twentieth-century kitchens, the unruly tides of New England chowder have carved out a handful of discrete channels. Although cookbook writers enjoy nothing more than to concoct new and exotic chowders, the more traditional varieties of the dish differ in a mere handful of seemingly innocuous decisions relating to only a handful of ingredients: whether or not they contain dairy, whether potatoes or other vegetables are involved, whether the main protein is fish or shellfish and whether herbs or other add-ins are included. Where one comes from, it seems, says much about how a person decides what is proper. Chowder is regional. The most famous interloper, the tomato, began littering stewpots in southern New England as early as the 1870s, and since that time, it has become characteristic of that impoverished cuisine. In Maine, lobster bodies may be used to flavor the broth; New Hampshirites traditionally disdain vegetables altogether, while Rhode Islanders shun the dairy; and although the first splash of milk took a while to be accepted, it is now de rigueur in Massachusetts and at many points spreading out from there.

While the white, milk-based chowder of Massachusetts is often set apart from the tomato- and vegetable-laden Manhattan style, strange hybrids can be found. Along the I-91 corridor, tomato and milk sometimes combine to make a bright pink potage that seems to please no one but the confused remnants who live in that thin band between Sox and Yankees. In the dark estaminets of Providence and Pawtucket, a brothy bowl of Rhode Island chowder may sometimes be found flirting with a glass of milk for mixing in, and while early chowder makers made do with whatever fish might be at hand (though cod and haddock were most often preferred), modern chowders venture into scallops, clams, mussels and lobster and even into non-seafood, like the vaguely sinister cheeseburger chowder. Within their seemingly tight constraints, chowder masters can be surprisingly innovative, as they have been for centuries. The chowder pot has limited hues, but it is a palate to be admired.

It is perhaps easiest to think of regional tastes in modern chowder by reference to the science of epidemiology: distinct tastes radiate outward from three distinct centers of infection. From the western Connecticut shore, the tomato has spread coastwise to the Rhode Island border; dairy has spread outward from Boston Harbor to nearly every corner of the chowder world; while the brothy variants have held on in the vicinity of Narragansett Bay. In the end, however, the variations in chowder making within a region are often greater than the variation between regions, confounding expectations left and right. For all the disdain heaped upon the tomato, that fruit has a long New England history, and blaming it on (or crediting it to) Italian immigrants in New York and their zuppa di pesce seems unnecessary, given that the tomato has been part of Connecticut cuisine since prior to the great wave of Italian immigration.

What, then, makes a chowder? The great food writer John Thorne has both begged the question and offered a key insight. For him, chowder "represents the special preparation of some very ordinary ingredients, while a stew represents an ordinary preparation of some very special ingredients." To a native New Englander, a gourmet chowder is as offensive to the sensibilities as a gourmet cheese steak is to a native Philadelphian (delicious offense, but offense nonetheless). This is a plain dish, pure and simple — more substantial than a typical soup, more unassuming than a hearty stew. With that in mind, let us wander from the colonial coast to the New England present.

(Continues…)


Excerpted from "A History of Chowder"
by .
Copyright © 2011 Robert S. Cox and Jacob Walker.
Excerpted by permission of The History Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Table of Contents

Prologue. Chowder in Preparation,
CHOWDER BEGINS,
Chowder Has an Identity,
Chowder and the Newfound Lands,
Cookbooks, Cod and Country,
THE ANATOMY OF CHOWDER,
Salt Pork,
Potatoes,
Fish,
Clams,
Conclusion,
Appendix A. Recipes,
Appendix B. Terms,
Appendix C. Priscilla D. Webster versus the Blue Ship Tea Room,
Appendix D. Stories,
Bibliography,
About the Authors,

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