“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
