Chowda!: Three Centuries of Recipes Reveal the Rise of New England’s Finest Culinary Export

Say chow­der out loud: chow­der. The word sounds like food. Not an appe­tiz­er either. An entree in a small crock topped with bro­ken crack­ers.

As with so many things relat­ed to food, chow­der is a sto­ried dish. It hails from New Eng­land and north­east­ern Cana­da, its first writ­ten ref­er­ence dat­ing back to 1732 when a jour­nal­ist recalls din­ing on a “fine chow­dered cod.”

There are as many types of chow­der as there are soup, though a true chow­der is more like a stew than a soup. Some purists would rather eat slugs than a chow­der with toma­toes in it or whose name ref­er­ences New York. But all chow­ders must fea­ture the fol­low­ing: broth, salt pork, bis­cuit and seafood.

Aside from that, all bets are off. Chow down.

Of course a region­al dish with this long a his­to­ry and which leaves this much room for inter­pre­ta­tion deserves a his­to­ry of its own, and so the good peo­ple at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Mass­a­chu­setts, Amherst cre­at­ed the New Eng­land Chow­der Com­pendi­um, a col­lec­tion of recipes and ephemera explor­ing how chow­der rose to become a sta­ple of New Eng­land cook­ery.

Culled from cook­books held by the university’s Beat­rice McIn­tosh Cook­ery Col­lec­tion, the com­pendi­um chron­i­cles chow­der recipes from the 1700s to the 1970s, through lean times and fat, through recipes heavy with cream and with­out.

And so, as read­ers click through fea­tured chow­der recipes from the 1920s on through to the 1940s, they’re sure to notice the ways ingre­di­ents vary. Use evap­o­rat­ed milk and a lit­tle water, if cream is not avail­able. House­wives were wise in the 1940s to be thrifty while mak­ing fresh stock from knuck­les: Save that fat that rose to the top and sell it to your meat deal­er.

Chow­der may be one of the poster food for peo­ple who are mak­ing do. Don’t have fresh seafood? Canned tuna will do. Lima beans soaked overnight can sub­sti­tute for clams.

As with most hand­writ­ten recipes, the hand­writ­ing and illus­tra­tions are part of the fun. One rad­i­cal sug­gests adding a dash of papri­ka. This recipe, for the Kingston Yacht Club, may have fed the entire mem­ber­ship (three gal­lons of clams?!)

The archivists include a nice primer, trac­ing the devel­op­ment of chow­der (the word comes from French for “caul­dron”).

One recipe that doesn’t sound so good: diet chow­der from the 1970s.

Kate Rix writes about dig­i­tal media and edu­ca­tion. Read more of her work at and at thenifty.blogspot.com.