My father was a fisherman My mama was the fisherman's friend And I was born in the boredom And the chowder So when I reached my prime I left my home in the Maritimes Headed down the turnpike for New England, Sweet New England. —From Paul Simon, "Duncan"
If there’s such a thing as an official recipe for New England Clam Chowder, it would probably be the version served at the Union Oyster House in Boston (and happily handed out to departing guests upon request):
2 oz. Salt Pork, scored 1 cup Onions, chopped 1/2 cup Butter 1/2 cup Flour 1/2 cup Celery, minced 2 lb. Clams, fresh [doubled from original to allow for weight of shells] 1 qt. Clam juice 1/4 tsp. Thyme 1/2 lb. Potatoes, diced 2 cups Half & half, warmed Salt/pepper/Worcestershire/Tabasco
Render salt pork, add butter, onions, celery, and cook. Add flour and stir into a roux. Remove salt pork. Add thyme, clam juice, potatoes. Sauté closed clams to open, chop, and add with juice. Add half & half and season to taste.
Having established our purist bona fides with this minor homage to the oldest restaurant in America (1836), let’s admit that no one else in Boston makes clam chowder precisely the same way.
The Boston Sail Loft adds a ton of fresh dill instead of the thyme.
Joe’s Waterfront omits the pork and tops it off with bacon, grease and all.
We can’t recall how Pauli’s North End serves it, because we were mesmerized by their lobster roll.
And then there’s the thick, celery-infused concoction at Legal Seafoods.
And Abe & Louie’s steakhouse version.
And the tavern style at Warren Tavern.
And the take-out at James Hook.
And…
And as our guests regularly point out at our own homestyle lobster feasts, what we serve qualifies more as a seafood stew—thick enough with haddock, swordfish, cod, flounder, shrimp, scallops, and clams to stand a spoon in it—whatever we have on hand (and that’s usually a lot!)—but with one absolute, inviolable, religious-strengh omission…
"Manhattan clam chowder is only a vegetable soup and not to be confused with New England Clam Chowder, nor spoken of in the same breath. Tomatoes and clams have no more affinity than ice cream and horseradish."
—From Eleanor Early, New England Sampler (1940)
The name “chowder” probably derives (with several permutations) from the French word “chaudron”, or cauldron. Chowder was originally smuggled by hungry sailors from Cornwall and Brittany across the raging waters of the Atlantic to the shores of the rugged Canadian Maritimes. Then, like Paul Simon’s Duncan, the recipe headed down the turnpike for New England. Like all classic dishes—and any New England tradition worth its salt—the details are argued over long after anyone has ceased to care. Along with every hideous penalty call from the latest Pats, Bruins, or Celtics brawl, it’s what the locals call conversation.
My father was a sea captain, so was his father, and his father before him, and all my uncles. My mother's people all followed the sea. I suppose that if I had been born a few years earlier, I would have had my own ship.
—Joseph Crosby Lincoln
Bivalvia Mollusca are one of those supremely odd foods where no one can imagine being the first prehistoric human to open and consume one. Scallops might feature one of the most elegant shapes in the natural world, but is there anything less appetizing than the bedraggled exterior or slithery interior of an oyster or a clam? Still, once the omnivorous French got involved, and after centuries of development, mollusks evolved into a signature food for communities all over the globe.
Picture Belgium without its mussels, England without its cockles and winkles, Brittany without its oysters, or New England without its oysters, scallops, steamers, littlenecks, cherrystones, and quahogs. Inconceivable! Mollusks, and especially clams, are as much a part of a New Englander’s identity as last winter’s Nor’easter or the dropped “R” in their drawl.
New England clam chowder, made as it should be, is a dish to preach about, to chant praises and sing hymns and burn incense before. It is as American as the Stars and Stripes, as patriotic as the national Anthem. It is Yankee Doodle in a kettle.
Joseph Crosby Lincoln
What do Malcolm X, Ho Chi Minh, and our Ben have in common? They all started off the American chapter of their working lives as busboys and kitchen help at the Parker House Hotel in downtown Boston. That venerable establishment redefined American hotel dining in the 19th century and, along the way, invented Boston Cream Pie and Parker House Rolls. They also claim to have invented Boston Schrod, but we know for a fact that Dini’s, now long closed and no longer able to speak for themselves, came up with the ruse when patrons refused to order the cod they’d overstocked.
Nowadays, of course, what we wouldn’t give for a dish of genuine, fresh-caught Grand Banks cod…
But we digress—the point being that our Ben still recalls climbing out of bed on many a god-forsaken Jeffries Point morning, stumbling down through the slush to the bitterly cold waterfront, taking the Blue Line from Maverick Square under the harbor to State Street, crawling up through more aging snowbanks past Old City Hall and Ben Franklin’s statue, to the sudden blast of heat from the Parker House kitchens.
Every one of those mornings, before Ben gathered his wits and headed out to the dining room floor, the Parker’s sous-chefs served him a bowl of their finest New England clam chowder. So we speak with some authority when we swear that—although no record exists of Malcolm’s or Ho’s opinion of the delicious concoction—we can be quite certain they loved it. It only makes [a New England kind of] sense.