Venus Rising

Food for SoulIssue: Sagittarius 07

Take the Chill Out of the Holiday Season with Chowder

The feverish charge to finish the year with memorable seasonal foods and recipes takes place during our darkest days. Whether we shiver from the chill or with excitement, we need to warm and soothe ourselves from the inside out this time of year. Major holiday meals are often pre-destined, consisting of the traditional turkey, brisket, or roast beef. However, the pre-event meals, the appetizer buffets, morning breakfasts, or quick bites eaten before rushing off to the holiday pageant, can be more innovative and are often the most inviting and welcoming moments of the season. One delicious and easy, yet luxurious example of a perfect welcoming meal is chowder.

Chowder can be quite simple or very fancy, and it is easy to prepare, leaving the chef time to greet and mingle or go out. Chowder can cook in a crock pot and be ready to warm you when you get home or be available as visitors trickle in. So much more than soup, chowder is a hearty meal. The name comes from the French word chaudière, meaning cauldron. Defined as a thick, chunky seafood soup, chowder originated with French fishermen who made these stews with their fresh catches. A large community cauldron was used to make a group soup in which each participant contributed an ingredient…fish, milk, potatoes, pork, or seasonings. When the chowder was finished, each person withdrew his or her share of the soup.

With its coastal beginnings, it is easy to see why seafood played a starring role in chowder. Vegetables, of course, were also a common form of sustenance, as was pork, salted and cured to extend its usefulness. The addition of milk most likely came as a byproduct of the addition of crackers. An ancient way to extend and enrich thin liquid stock or soups was to add some sort of dried bread. The expansion of the hard bread by the liquid meant filling more hungry mouths and sustaining them longer than fluid soups. This basic method persisted for ages and in France, where milk was a vital element of food culture in its transformation to cheese, it was used to soften common crackers which were then added to the chowder cauldron. Not only does milk or cream distinguish chowder from soup, but it also gives it richness and heft.

While cream-based soup has evolved over time into more refined and fancy soups, such as vichyssoise or lobster bisque, chowder, likely the common ancestor of these starlets, remains markedly the same. Spreading from Europe to the new world, it dug its roots in New England and has been most commonly associated with that region ever since. Some changes have been made to original chowders however, most notably, the evolution of crackers from hard caked flour to common oyster crackers as its present-day automatic accompaniment.