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Chowders & Seafood Soups
Clam Chowder, Maine Lobster Chowder and Fish Chowder recipes are as numerous and differently made as there are cooks in New England. Everyone seems to have their own secret recipe for making chowders. Every town seems to have a clam chowder contest. One contest, the honor of best clam chowder in all of New England, quite an honor is held every year. And even in that contest all the chowders have only a couple of things in common; they all have clams in them and they are all white in color. But there is always a winner whose clam chowder is tastier than all the rest. Why is there so much variance in all of the recipes? Three reasons are in play; the first is what type of chowder the native New Englander likes, the second is what the summer tourists prefer for chowder, and lastly if you dug your own clams or bought them at the store (fresh shucked in a can, frozen chopped clam meat or still in the shell). The fresh clams still in the shell produce the best chowder because using them produces the clam broth that is necessary for the chowder. You can buy it by the can but it is not the same and it is expensive. So for all of the following chowders and soups, I am going to write down all the different ones that I know. From thick to thin, high in calories or lower, use of flour roux, cream or just milk. I hope you find the one you like. Chowders are fun to make especially if you dig your own clams. One last thing, for some reason chowders are best served the following days after they have had a chance to cool and be reheated. I will also give a recipe for a large amount of chowder, the way they make it in a restaurant and there technique used to make this type of chowder which is basic clam stock base. Which is made with out milk or cream and then is reheated in smaller portions with cream or milk. I worked one summer in a seafood restaurant, The Captain Kidd in Woods Hole, MA and have made many 25 gallon pots of clam chowder base. It is the only way to keep the supply up during the summer, everyone orders chowdah. The tourists love really thick chowdah; the kind you can stick a spoon upright in the middle of the bowl. While the native prefer creamy but thinner. One very popular chowder house ( Wendells in North Falmouth) served (it burned down) a thin milk clam chowder which I will include. Good luck, I will try to make it easy for you but good chowdahs are a not easy to make. They are a lot easier to burn. Patience, perseverance and never leave the kitchen makes a chowder. Lastly, We should give thanks to all the clam diggers, bull rakers and clam draggermen that have provide the necessary Quahog clam (comes from the Narragansett Indian name "poqua", there name for this hard clam). These fishermen work a very hard and dangerous life to provide us with clams. The clam rakers who work from a skiff using a very long bull rake in 10 to 20 feet of water all year around have a particularly hard job. The biggest of them go by the nickname "Bull" because the work gives them enormous shoulders, arms and back muscles. Many of them could play the line for any NFL team. The clams you eat from canned clam chowder are harvested by draggers (60 foot ships) out in the sound scooping up tons of huge quahogs with chain link nets. The big clams migrate out to the sound over time probably to avoid some inland predator like the horseshoe crab. The horsecrab has not changed (evolved) in more than 300 million years. They are just like they were 100 million years before the dinosaurs showed up. They are not a crab that is more related to a scorpion. The one thing they know how to do is open quahogs. Something that very few people know how to do correctly. And the horseshoe crab may not even have a brain. They have eight legs each with a different apparatus on each leg. One for digging, another for holding the clam securely, another piercer to open the clam and another with small claws to eat the clam meat. See how to open a quahog.
