Cod_ A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World - Mark Kurlansky [82]
Vittles for the Captain: Cape Cod Sea-Food Recipes,
Provincetown, 1941
ADD WHAT YOU LIKE
Four pounds of fish are enough to make a chowder for four or five people; half a dozen slices of salt pork in the bottom of the pot; hang it high, so that the pork may not burn; take it out when done very high brown; put in a layer of fish, cut in lengthwise slices, then a layer formed of crackers, small or sliced onions, and potatoes sliced as thin as a four pence, mixed with pieces of pork you have fried; then a layer of fish again, and so on. Six crackers are enough. Strew a little salt and pepper over each layer; over the whole pour a bowl-full of flour and water, enough to come up even with the surface of what you have in the pot. A sliced lemon adds to the flavor. A cup of tomato catsup is very excellent. Some people put in beer. A few clams are a pleasant addition. It should be covered so as not to let a particle of steam escape, if possible. Do not open it, except when nearly done, to taste if it be well seasoned.
—Lydia Maria Child,
The American Frugal Housewife,
Boston, 1829
In nineteenth-century New England, chowder parties became fashionable. A dozen or more people would go for a morning sail and then prepare the chowder either on board or later, on the beach. Also at this time, adding milk to chowder came into fashion, which meant that a chowder then required more than basic seagoing provisions. (See page 76.)
FISH CHOWDER: A NEW APPROACH
Fannie Merritt Farmer, an enormously influential cookbook writer, believed in extremely precise instructions and popularized the idea of exact measurements for recipes, an illusion of science that has become standard practice and, for more than 100 years, has left household cooks saying, “What went wrong? I followed the recipe.” She was the most famous director of the Boston Cooking School, founded a generation earlier to teach working-class women how to cook “scientifically.” Influenced by this school, freedom of choice has slowly been exorcised from recipes, and experimenting is increasingly discouraged.
Fannie Farmer’s chowder recipe differs greatly from previous ones not only in its precise measurements but in that it is not made in one pot and completely abandons the idea of building a chowder in layers. The following recipe is clearly designed with a stove in mind, using several pots and even more than one burner at a time. When stoves replaced hearths, the way people cooked changed.
4 lb. cod or haddock.
6 cups potatoes cut in ¼ inch slices, or
4 cups potatoes cut in ¾ inch cubes.
1 sliced onion.
1½ inch cube fat salt pork.
1 tablespoon salt.
⅛ teaspoon pepper.
3 tablespoons butter.
4 cups scalded milk.
8 common crackers.
Order the fish skinned, but head and tails left on. Cut off head and tails and remove fish from backbone. Cut fish in two-inch pieces and set aside. Put head, tail and backbone broken in pieces, in stewpan; add two cups cold water and bring slowly to a boiling point; cook twenty minutes. Cut salt pork in small pieces and try out, add onion, and fry five minutes; strain fat into stewpan. Parboil potatoes five minutes in boiling water to cover; drain, and add potatoes to fat; then add two cups boiling water and cook five minutes. Add liquor drained from bones and fish; cover, and simmer ten minutes. Add milk, salt, pepper, butter and crackers, split and soaked in enough cold milk to moisten. Pilot bread is sometimes used in place of common crackers.
—Fannie Merritt Farmer,
The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book, 1896
THE LAST TERRE-NEUVAS
In the French Channel ports, the men who fished Newfoundland were called the Terre-Neuvas. The last of them left from the Breton port of St.-Malo and the Norman port of Fecamp in the 1970s. In the campaign of 1961, the year after the following book was published, 22,000 tons of Grand Banks salt cod were still landed in Fécamp. The original French word for chowder, la chaudrée, has vanished, and here, the Marseillaise word is used for the soup.