Warm up with these hearty chowders
When our thermostat broke on a chilly day in December, the furnace guys who came to our rescue could not stop talking about clam chowder. The soup is so hearty that even the thought of spooning up some its creamy goodness can warm you.
Clams, potatoes and onions sauteed in bacon drippings — that’s pure comfort food in the winter. But if you’re from New England, you’re probably enjoying this clammy concoction year-round.
Serious chowderheads from that region can argue endlessly about where to find the best bowl and the merits of the various carbs to serve with it. But even on its own, with just a spoon, the seaworthy soup has inspired poetic odes.
“Oh, sweet friends! hearken to me,” wrote “Moby Dick” author Herman Melville. “It was made of small, juicy clams, scarcely bigger than hazelnuts, mixed with pounded ship biscuit and salted pork cut up into little flakes; the whole enriched with butter, and plentifully seasoned with pepper and salt.”
The history of clam chowder is a bit opaque, like the broth itself. Originally considered a poor man’s stew, the predecessors to today’s chowders date back centuries to fishing villages around the world. They were made from vegetables and fish stewed in a large cauldron. The word “chowder” is believed to have its root in the Latin word “calderia.”
Food historians have theorized that French or Nova Scotians first introduced fish stew to the New England settlers. The Pilgrims were slow to incorporate shellfish into their meals, so it was the Native Americans who made history by marrying the sweet, briny clams to the creamy broth.
By the mid-1800s, the classic New England-style clam chowder had become a fixture on menus throughout the region. Boston’s Union Oyster House, the oldest continuously operating restaurant in the U.S., has served it up since 1836. That’s a lot of chowdah!
As we all know, this iconic stew has inspired multiple spin-offs in America. But those who revere the original New England version do not recognize the tomato-based Manhattan version as the real deal. It’s the chowder that dares not say its name.
“Manhattan Chowder is not a chowder,” said Seadon Shouse, chef/partner of the Coast Kitchen at the Timber Cove Inn in Jenner. “I consider it a tomato-clam based soup. To me, chowder is creamy.”
New England takes this clam dish so seriously that in 1939, the Massachusetts legislature passed a bill making tomatoes in clam chowder illegal. A truce was negotiated with the recent invention of Long Island Chowder, a mashup of tomatoes and cream. Think creamy tomato soup, and it doesn’t sound so bad.
Here on the West Coast, clam chowder has become synonymous with seaside dining, and we often like a side of ocean view to go with our bowls, whether we’re at a casual deli or a white-tablecloth restaurant.
The accouterments are usually simple but carb-driven. If you’re from the Northeast, you’re going to go with a handful of oyster crackers. Here on the West Coast, we sometimes christen it with a new vessel consisting of a sourdough bread bowl.
At Coast Kitchen in Jenner, Shouse gives the chowder an East Coast twist by using smoked trout raised by Duck Trap Farms of Maine. The native of Nova Scotia also serves a version of the Smoked Trout Chowder at his restaurant Halifax, located on the Hudson River in Hoboken, New Jersey.
For the chowder, Shouse likes to use clam juice for its briny-yet-mild and fresh ocean flavor. He adds potatoes, onions and fennel, thyme and bay leaf, then slowly pours in heavy cream, often stabilizing it with a bit of cornstarch slurry.
“With the trout, you don’t taste the clam juice, but the background has a developed flavor,” he said. “And we finish it at the very end with fresh dill.”
Although his bi-coastal commute can be tough in the summer, when he goes back and forth often, the setting at Timber Cove on a dramatic cliff overlooking a picturesque ocean cove tends to relax him and make him feel at home.
“I grew up on the ocean,” he said. “The seaweed was on our roof in the middle of a storm. I fished from the rocks and the wharves.”
Shouse and his Coast Kitchen team, which includes two chef de cuisines, will be cooking the entree for a special dinner on March 24 at the Sonoma International Film Festival (SIFF). The Devour dinner honors legendary chef Jacques Pepin, who will be there to receive the first-ever SIFF Culinary Excellence Award.
In addition, Shouse is in the final stages of writing a cookbook about his culinary roots in Nova Scotia that also highlights the cross-fertilization between his East and West coast restaurants, Halifax and Coast Kitchen.
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