Ingredient

Chowder

A chowder is a thick, chunky soup built on rendered pork fat, onions, potato and milk or cream, with fish, shellfish or corn in it. The word covers a family rather than a recipe, and what they share is texture: chowder is deliberately not smooth, and blending one is the surest way to stop it being a chowder.

The construction

Nearly every chowder follows the same five moves, and they are worth knowing because they let you make one out of whatever you have.

Render pork — bacon, salt pork or pancetta — until crisp, and keep the fat. Soften onion and celery in that fat. Add potato and liquid, and cook until the potato is tender. Add the main ingredient — fish, clams, corn — briefly, at the end. Finish with milk or cream, off a hard boil.

The potato is doing structural work as well as being an ingredient. A floury potato releases starch into the liquid and thickens it, which is the traditional way a chowder gets its body — no flour, no roux, just starch from the potato. Some recipes crush a few of the potato pieces against the side of the pan to encourage it.

The pork fat is where a great deal of the flavour lives. A chowder made with butter instead is perfectly nice and is noticeably less savoury.

The chowders

New England clam chowder

Cream or milk based, thick, white. The one most people mean.

Manhattan clam chowder

Tomato based, no dairy, thinner. Regarded as heresy in New England, which is part of its charm.

Rhode Island clam chowder

Clear broth, no dairy and no tomato.

Corn chowder

Sweetcorn, often with the stripped cobs simmered in the milk for flavour. Excellent, and entirely vegetarian if you drop the pork.

Fish chowder

White fish — cod, haddock, pollock — added at the very end so it just cooks through.

Cullen skink

The Scottish relative: smoked haddock, potato, onion, milk. Same construction, different name.

Smoked fish generally

Smoked haddock is the great chowder fish in Britain, and its smoke does what the pork does elsewhere.

Making a fish chowder

1. Render diced bacon or salt pork in a heavy pan until crisp. Lift the crisp bits out for the top, and leave the fat.
2. Soften diced onion and celery in that fat, slowly, without colouring.
3. Add diced floury potato, a bay leaf and thyme, and enough stock or water to just cover. Simmer until the potato is tender.
4. Crush a few pieces of potato against the side of the pan to thicken the liquid.
5. Add milk and cream and bring it to a bare simmer — never a boil, which will split it.
6. Add the fish in large chunks and take the pan off the heat. Residual heat cooks white fish through in three or four minutes and it stays in flakes rather than disintegrating.
7. Season, and check for acidity — a squeeze of lemon lifts a dairy soup considerably.
8. Serve with the crisp pork on top, chopped parsley or chives, and crackers or bread.

What goes wrong

• Split, grainy dairy. It boiled. Milk and cream go in at the end and never boil.
• Thin and watery. Not enough starch. Use floury potatoes and crush some of them, or add a little flour with the onions.
• Fish in shreds. Added too early or cooked too hard. Add it off the heat, in large pieces.
• Rubbery shellfish. Clams, mussels and prawns need seconds. Add them at the very end.
• Gluey. Over-thickened, or the potato was cooked to disintegration. Some texture should remain.
• Bland. No pork, no smoke and no acid. Any of the three transforms it.

Common questions