Potluck dish / regional comfort food
New England clam chowder
FestiveDocumented🧂 🍄moyen50 min
A thick, creamy soup of clams, potatoes, onion, and smoked bacon, bound with milk. A warm and hearty dish, star of East Coast winter potlucks.
Why this dish? Radia Perlman spent much of her career in Massachusetts (MIT in Cambridge, DEC in Maynard). Clam chowder is THE iconic dish of New England, the one shared at team meals or coastal winter evenings.
When you live in Massachusetts, you don't argue about chowder — you serve it white, creamy, never with tomato, or the old-timers will give you the side-eye. For a team potluck, I liked to simmer a big pot: you fry the bacon, sweat the onion, throw in the potatoes, the clams with their juice, and bind with milk without ever boiling it hard. You eat it in bowls, with a spoon, talking shop. It's the kind of dish that reconciles a team after an all-nighter chasing a routing bug.
Ingredients
- •Fresh clams (quahogs) — several pounds (marine base, umami)
- •Salt pork or bacon — a piece (fat base)
- •Onion — 1 (aromatic)
- •Potatoes — a few (body)
- •Milk and cream — as needed (creamy binder)
- •Oyster crackers — for serving (accompaniment)
How it was made : Chowder (from Occitan/French *chaudière*) has been documented in New England since the 18th century. The white, milk-based version fiercely opposes Manhattan's tomato-based chowder — so much so that a Maine law was proposed in 1939 to ban tomatoes from chowder.
Sources : Farmer, F. — The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book (1896) · Oliver, S. — Saltwater Foodways (1995)