chowder a term first used in N. America in the 1730s, may well be derived from the French word chaudière meaning the sort of iron cooking pot which early French settlers took to what are now the Maritime Provinces of Canada. When they encountered the Canadian Micmac Indians they found that the latter had a great appetite for their native clams but were having to cook them with hot stones placed in water in a hollowed-out piece of tree trunk. It has been suggested that a natural marriage took place between the clams which the Indians had and the pots which the settlers brought. Indeed, it seems likely that this combination of European technology with American foodstuffs was happening at many places more or less simultaneously, so that there could be no way of telling where the first real ‘clam chowder’ was made.
