George Bates

2005 | No. 69

Maine Fish Chowder
The Perspective of the 14th Generation

 

By Nancy Harmon Jenkins

The fish chowder served in most public eating places, even here in Down East Maine where they ought to know better, is so bad that I never order it unless I’m suffering an attack of the mean blues. Why I eat restaurant-style fish chowder in such situations is simple. It gives me something specific on which to focus a bilious attention.

What I mean by “restaurant-style fish chowder” is: fish chowder with the color and consistency of slightly liquefied library paste, gluey enough so a spoon will almost stand up in it, made of an insufficiently cooked white sauce and riddled with questionable bits of seafood, a few slivers of old-tasting potato, and fragments of disagreeably sweet onion. This, my daughter the chef tells me, is more often than not made of something called “chowder base,” sold by restaurant-supply outfits to be mixed at the point of service with water — or with milk in more high-end establishments. This is the only chowder many unfortunates will ever know.

And so it was, at the end of a long and extremely cold winter of many discontents, that I found myself down on the docks in Portland, Maine, on the first true day of spring, looking at the offerings in a brightly painted fish shop called “Free Range Fish.” I was attracted by the hand-lettered sandwich board on the sidewalk advertising wild mussels. I’m not a huge fan of mussels, but the fact that these were wild was seductive. You almost never see wild mussels anymore unless you harvest them yourself — not easy given that so much of our shore frontage has been rendered off-limits by development. I seem to suffer from a genetic tic that responds uncritically to the word “wild” when associated with foodstuffs. Wild game, wild mushrooms, wild asparagus, wild fiddleheads, wild mussels — it doesn’t make much difference what it is, the mere fact that it’s wild (hence, in a certain sense, free) calls to something in my stingy Yankee blood.

Because it was spring, the man in charge agreed to set up a table outside. (I should explain that spring in Maine comes along about the third week in April, if we’re lucky, and what it means is: If you can find a place sheltered from the onshore breeze and turn your face to the sun, it starts to feel warm on your cheeks. It was that kind of day in Portland.) And because it had been a long, hard winter that wasn’t really over yet, I ordered, in addition to the wild mussels, a bowl of fish chowder and some fried clams. The mussels were tiny and sweet as all get-out, the clams were fresh enough though somewhat hampered by the crumbled Ritz crackers in which they had been dipped, but the chowder — the chowder that was supposed to confirm my gloom — was, to my surprise, delicious, almost perfect, almost as good as the chowder my mother used to make. It was properly milky — you can’t have a chowder without milk, we say around here — but not thick, not that barely liquefied suspension that so often passes for chowder. It was solid enough, it’s true, but solid with chunks of fresh haddock and small, tender diced potatoes and onions, all swimming in a milky broth dotted with melted puddles of butter. Sitting there in the watery sunshine at the grittier end of Commercial Street, with a view of Hapag Lloyd containers stacked on both sides of the highway, I happily lapped up the whole small bowl and, feeling a little like Ishmael in Moby Dick, called for another — clam this time. With chowder that good, you don’t want to eat just one.

Free Range Fish is still on the Portland waterfront but, alas, no longer serves prepared food. Still, I treasure the memory of that chowder just as much as Ishmael did the one served by Mrs. Hussey on Nantucket. The last night before they set sail on the Pequod, as he and Queequeg went off to bed, she stopped to ask them: “Clam or cod tomorrow for breakfast, men?”

“Both,” Ishmael replied, “and let’s have a couple of smoked herring by way of variety.”

My mother, a 13th-generation Down East Yankee cook at ease in her kitchen in Camden, always started her chowder by trying out, as she put it, diced salt pork. That old English term means to render. You try out pork fat, just as you do whale blubber, to separate the liquid part from the solid. When the bits of pork were crisp and the fat was runny in the bottom of the heavy chowder kettle, she strained out the pork bits and set them aside, then added chopped onions to the fat. “Not too hot, now,” she said, because you don’t want the onions to brown but rather to melt. Once the onions were soft, she stirred diced potatoes into the oniony fat, added water just to cover, and cooked the potatoes until they were soft. Finally the fish, a meaty slab of haddock cut into chunks, was set on top of the potatoes. Just when the fish changed color, going from translucent to opaque white, she added milk — rich whole milk enhanced with extra cream, a little salt, and a lot of pepper. Once the milk began to simmer, she covered the kettle and put the whole thing to set — not sit, but set — on the back of the stove, invariably mentioning that “down home” (meaning back in Thomaston, where she came from a line of sea captains) they let the chowder set on the warming shelf of the cookstove for an entire day before it was considered sufficiently mature to be consumed. And then just before it was served, she stirred in the crisp pork bits she had tried out so many hours before, together with a good big lump of butter.

There were and are variations. Sometimes she threw in a couple of bay leaves with the onions, and once in a while she sprinkled paprika over the top — just for color, since the paprika she used had no discernible taste. I have started chowder with diced slab bacon when good salt pork wasn’t available and liked the slight smokiness it lends the dish. I have also, following the footsteps of Boston’s master seafood chef Jasper White, used finnan haddie instead of haddock, which gives a decidedly smoky flavor — delicious if you like that sort of thing. But the basic preparation remains the same and it makes an excellent dish, one hearty enough to serve as a main course, which chowder almost always was, along with a couple of sour cucumber pickles for contrast. ●

Here’s the recipe for Maine Fish Chowder.

From issue 69

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