Seafood Chowder.

Cold and rainy weather signal the beginning of chowder season. Prepare yourselves accordingly.

INGREDIENTS

• 1 lb frozen seafood variety

• ¼ lb bacon or bacon tips, cut into ½ inch pieces

• 4T butter

• 1 small yellow onion, chopped

• 1 large leek, sliced

• 4 red potatoes or 2 medium russet potatoes, diced (skin on)

• 1 sprig of thyme or a teaspoon of dried thyme (sub or add rosemary if you want)

• 6 cups chicken stock or broth

• 2 cups cream

• Salt

• Black pepper

INSTRUCTIONS

1. Heat your bacon in the bottom of a stock pot over medium until the fat renders, if there isn’t much to it, add in butter a tablespoon at a time until melted fat/butter covers the whole surface of the bottom of your pot but no more. 

2. Add in the onions and the leeks, season with rosemary, salt and pepper to your preference and stir. Cook until the onions are translucent, add in the potatoes and stir. After about three minutes, add the chicken broth and bring to a low boil for 5 minutes. 

3. Add in the seafood and keep at a simmer for 10 minutes. Check potatoes and seafood for doneness. 

4. When you are ready to eat but not before, add the cream and stir to bring it back to temperature. Taste again for salt and pepper, serve with a crusty bread.

Chowder is a winter food. Soup, in general, can serve year-round in a number of different capacities but the form and subsequent function of chowder is to take accessible fresh materials and combine them with seasonally available winter ingredients in order to create a warming, filling and nutritious soup.

The word “chowder” comes from the French “chaudiere” which means a large pot or cauldron used for cooking by suspension over a fire. Basically every coast in the entire world has some variation on putting sea creatures into a pot with some other ingredients and herbs to produce a brothy soup and that’s effectively what a chowder is. 

The Wampanoag People ate chowders and attempted to offer them to the heinous and terrible Puritan pilgrims who turned up their noses at anything from the water but eel. In the fall and winter the pilgrims would feed mussels and clams -- a highly accessible and low-effort protein source -- to their hogs.

American chowders, developed after the colonialists reinvented the whole soup, at their core originate from the very simple logistical maneuver of trying to stretch out the resources you have when the resources are sparse. The most basic original recorded recipes include the things we identify with chowder now: hot fat, potatoes, onions, celery, herbs and sea animal. Notably, the addition of biscuits or hardtack to give the soup body and actually produce something edible from hardtack was also included. Also frequently, beer or wine.

You know, the good shit. That’s a soup, that’s like ten thousand soups.

Best understood now as a fall or winter soup, the most popular chowders are largely clam-based when bivalves are in season. There’s the colloquial rule that you shouldn’t eat shellfish in any month that doesn’t end with -r but that’s mostly because red algae proliferates in summer and will kill you if you eat it.

And so they developed regionally. We’re most familiar with New England clam chowder, at its best a charming dance between briny and creamy and at its worst something approaching soggy bread. There’s also Manhattan clam chowder, developed in steakhouses like Delmonico’s under the influence of Italians and thus has tomato as a base. Rhode Island clam chowder is one of the best, more traditional with no cream or wheat and built on a fatty broth that celebrates the bacon that begins it.

Delaware clam chowder uses quahogs. Florida chowder uses Spanish datil chili powder. Boston style uses vinegar apparently which absolutely whips. Today I learned that New Jersey clam chowder goes completely off the rails to add horrifying enigmatic ingredients like sliced tomato and asparagus.

There are lots of chowders that vary all over the place and they’re all wild but based on tradition and what’s regionally available. And now I am going to tell you about mine.

Seafood chowder, which I first had at the age of six on Cape Breton Island where my grandfather lived and died, is a fascinating deviation from the others. No tomato, no weird incorporation of hardtack, no elegant effervescence from white wine. 

It’s simple. You render bacon in the bottom of a pot, add onions, potatoes and maybe celery if it’s around and you build a basic broth on these simple items. Then, you add your seafood, wait for it to cook and just before serving you incorporate a full-fat cream, stirring gently so as not to break the fat from the cream, and then you serve it.

It’s creamy and brothy, fatty and wholesome. You don’t lose your ingredients in a giant bowl of bread mush, they’re all tender and packed with flavor from everything involved. It’s not formidable as a recipe, there’s no hassle and little cleanup. It’s shit you put in a pot to maximize the nutritional capability of the root vegetables from the cellar and the proteins you have on hand to keep your nine children alive through the winter. And it’s one of those recipes that they’ll remember for the rest of their lives because it tastes, simply, like love and home.

Today, there’s a bag of seafood mix typically available in the frozen section of Trader Joe’s that is sized and portioned out perfectly for this recipe. No sending the lads out to dig up some clams in sub-zero temperatures necessary. Personally, I don’t eat bacon because I’m a neurotic about animal agriculture so what I do instead is this:

In place of the bacon: melt a stick of good quality butter in the bottom of the pan. Add onions and get them translucent. Then add half a teaspoon of smoked paprika. Let the onions caramelize slightly. Then add sliced leeks, herbs and potatoes. Use a light vegetable stock, homemade chicken stock or Better than Boullion’s fake chicken base for a broth. Also I used goat cream because I’m off cow dairy right now and it was A+.

Anyway if you’re from Boston it’s illegal to yell at me for the contents of this recipe blog post. Enjoy.