The complexity of culinary action, reaction, and interaction finds a wonderfully vivid illustration in the annual Chowder Contest held on the island of Martha’s Vineyard off the southern coast of Cape Cod (Massachusetts). The chowder served on the Vineyard is a variant of the fish soups found in virtually every community close to a source of fresh fish—thus, France has bouillabaisse from Marseilles, garlic-laden bourride from Provence, chaudrée normande, and the matelotes, meurettes, and pachouses made from freshwater fish in a number of regions. This contemporary chowder of Martha’s Vineyard is associated with the North Atlantic coast of Canada and the United States and now usually features clams in a flour-based cream broth.The Oxford English Dictionary first cites chowder in 1762. The claim that Native Americans were already making chowder before the Europeans arrived points to the inevitable imprecision in dating a “traditional” dish. Native Americans did not have salt pork, a key ingredient in chowder making; in what sense, then, did they have chowder? The act of naming has the advantage of fixing a dish in that the more specific the name, the closer the definition of the dish comes to a recipe. In this sense chowder is generic, while Manhattan clam chowder is not.5 The name most likely comes from chaudière, the old French word for cooking pot or cauldron, and from the custom whereby fishermen would contribute part of their catch to a communal pot and receive a portion of the cooked dish in return. Chaudrée was the original French word for chowder. From Brittany fishermen carried the custom to Newfoundland, whence it spread south to Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and New England. Clam chowder is already a variation on the basic chowder, which tended toward the cod fished in abundance in the Atlantic, sometimes in its salted form. Today, as this trajectory and history would lead us to believe, there are any number of local variations, including two that make use of neither flour nor milk: Rhode Island clam chowder, with its clear clam broth, and Manhattan clam chowder, which adds vegetables to a tomato-based broth. Martha’s Vineyard “Island chowder” retains the flour-milk base and the potatoes but substitutes mixed seafood for the clams.
Temporal Flow of Cuisine: Traditional and Modern
