Chowda Head

I was dismayed to see your clam chowder recipe (“Culinary SOS”, August 2) The recipe from Legal Seafood Restaurant, a restaurant originally founded in Cambridge, MA where I lived for 15 years, and now a chain in New England, is a tribute to the bastardized recipes true aficianados like myself find traitorous. A properly made New England clam chowder is a dish to preach about, a dish to sing hymns for, to fight for. Just as a proper chili con carne never has beans or tomatoes in it, a true clam chowder should never contain flour, cream, and certainly never fish broth (might as well call it fish soup). A true clam chowder is very simple, but rarely gotten right. Adding flour and cream, popular with restaurant chefs, turns this elixir of “chowda” into white mud, unappetizing and gummy. Cream is also a no-no (but sometimes permissible, see below).

A clam chowder is made only one way, and you are more likely to find it well made in its home on Cape Cod than in Boston. A true clam chowder is made with, and only with, freshly shucked and chopped quahogs with their liquor (never canned clams), diced salt pork (not bacon), chopped onions, diced potatoes, butter, salt, white pepper (not black pepper, so the kids won’t try to pick it out), and if you can manage it, raw milk (in the nineteenth century Cape Codders could regularly get raw milk for making their chowder which had a much better, creamier taste than the processed milk of today. Therefore it’s proper to mix whole milk with half-and-half or a little heavy cream to approximate that old time taste.) Clam chowder can also have a little celery and a little sprinkle of thyme, but that’s it. It’s always served with oyster crackers and piping hot.

CLIFFORD A. WRIGHT

Santa Monica

Wright is a cookbook author and occasional contributor to the Food Section.