ISSUE 60, CHOWDERS, Part 2: Lobster Chowder
Lobster Chowder
Chowder is the great forbidden food. It double violates the Old Testament dietary laws found in Leviticus. The mingling of milk and meat—the soul of the chowder—goes against Hebrew kashrut—and shellfish is explicitly prohibited in Leviticus 11 as a detestable source of nutriment. But the good Puritans of New England took comfort in the suspension of the dietary laws in a divine vision given to Peter. The old believers of Massachusetts Bay, Connecticut, and Providence Plantations embraced the divine largesse and made seafood stewed in milk a culinary signature of New England. Oyster Chowder, Eel Chowder, Clam Chowder, and the rarest of the regional chowders, Lobster Chowder have been elaborated and refined in dozens of recipes. The older recipes have crackers as thickening. Bacon supplies the fat in most traditional formulas. Chopped onion, cubed potato are frequently found. When sweet corn became plentiful in the beginning of the 19th century that found its way into the chowder pot. Salt and pepper were the Puritan seasonings. Nutmeg was the first spice to be added to pot in the 1790s.
I had my first lobster chowder in a New England Restaurant, the Yankee Peddler, near Wallingfor CT in the 1980s. The usual snowy sea of white was dotted with pools of orange fat on the surface. Beautiful. The meat was not overcooked, the potatoes were modest and not clogging the tureen. I was an instant convert, and began wondering why more restaurants did not offer it. I know now of course: lobster chowder is harder to make than your bog standard lobster roll, steam pot lobster, or the lobster platter. Yet there has always been a select group of restaurants in Massachusetts and Maine that made a specialty of it. When the season beach pavilion restaurants sprang up on the coasts around Boston after the Civil War The Sea View House at Revere Beach and the Shippen Point Pavilion made it their house specialty. The oldest versions of the recipe are interesting for their lack of bacon or vegetables—its just milk, crackers, and lobster meat:
Springfield Republican (August 8m 1897), 1
The Gilded Age “lobster palace” restaurants in Manhattan and Boston gave the lobster a cachet that it had not enjoyed before the 1890s. Hotels began to elaborate the basic recipe and one can see the upscale version, including cod meat to make the mix extra thick.
New Britain Herald (April 17, 1915), 5
Maine’s contribution to the lobster chowder was to add sweet corn into the mix. In order to counter the sugariness of the flavor, buttermilk was substituted for milk in numbers of the recipes. My advice if you are going to do the Maine Corn and Lobster Chowder is to use the older varieties of sweet corn, such as Silver Queen or Country Gentlemen, and not the supersweets often encountered today at produce stands. The excessive sugariness of “How Sweet it Is” or other of the modern sweets throughs the flavor balance of the chowder off. In every of these chowder recipes the lobster is boiled or grilled in advance and the cold meat is added to the chowder pot.