Name: Spicy Fish Chowder
Yield: Serves 8 to 10.
Cuisine: United States
Ingredients: cayenne pepper to taste; 3 potatoes, diced; ⅛ teaspoon each mace and cloves dash each Tabasco and Worcestershire sauces; 1 cup each milk and heavy cream; 2 pounds cod or haddock fillets; 2 large onions, chopped; 24–36 hard-shelled clams; common crackers or oyster crackers; ¼ pound (1 stick) butter; 2 fresh tomatoes, peeled, seeded, and chopped; ¼ pound salt pork, diced; ½ teaspoon each black pepper and thyme; 4 cups boiling fish stock

Preparation info

Serves
8 to 10
.

Difficulty
Medium

Appears in

I Hear America Cooking

By Betty Fussell

Published 1986

About

“A chowder” Mary Lincoln says in her pedagogic way in The Boston School Kitchen Text Book, “is a stew of fish.” New England chowders began not with clams but with fish like cod or haddock or bass. Clams and blackfish were “tolerably good” substitutes, Mrs. A. L. Webster advises in The Improved Housewife (1842), but only if the hard part of the clam is “cut off and rejecte