Clam Chowder

To enter into the realm of chowder making is like eating right from history itself.  Going back over old references to 'chaudiere' (French for cauldron), 'jowter' (old English for fish peddler), and recipes dating to the middle of the 18th century, you can see the time-tested standard pattern of the ingredients of seafood, some form of pork, potatoes and cream, all well-seasoned.  No matter how you tweak these main ingredients, it seems safe to say that the spoonful of clam chowder today shares a similar taste to what the fisherman's family relished along the coastline villages of Cornwall England

hundreds of years ago.  The key to getting started on this recipe is to see to flavoring a lot of milk, heavy cream and potatoes.  You start with diced bacon – save the oil – and sautee onions and celery in that for veggie texture in the base stock. Add this to milk and heavy cream and let two diced potatoes cook for 20 minutes until the potato cubes are soft but still hold their form.  Add bacon and as much clam meat

as the soup eaters can handle and taste to see if the base is seasoned well enough or if the consistency needs more milk.  Or, as the oldest known written recipe (1751) for chowder suggests for finishing, "Then season well with Pepper, Salt and Spice; Parsley, Sweet-Marjoram, Savory, and Thyme, Then Biscuit next which must be soak'd some Time."  So we did.  A fresh loaf of bread happened to be sitting on the 

counter.  We cut slices into large cubes then sprinkled that with flakes of parmesan cheese and let them sit over the top of the soup to soak some time.  A bit of the sea and a bit of the fields in this soup, a sort of ancient broth of sustenance.