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Fish Chowder

A savory soup of fish, salt pork, crackers, onions, and spices, thickened with crackers or flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Fish Chowder

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. In an iron pot, fry the salt pork until crisp, then remove it, leaving the fat.

Layer and simmer

  1. Layer fish, split crackers, chopped pork, black pepper, red pepper, and chopped onions in the pot. Repeat the layers until all ingredients are used.

  2. Cover with water and simmer slowly until the fish is fully cooked.

  3. Remove the fish and keep it warm in a serving dish.

Finish the gravy

  1. Thicken the gravy with rolled crackers or flour, boil it once, and pour over the chowder.

  2. Optionally, add catsup, port wine, and lemon juice to the gravy before serving.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Pork + oniontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,214 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  3. Pepper + oniontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  4. Fish + porktop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together668 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-heptenal (creamy, biscuit).

  5. Fish + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,889 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Fresh fish
Forms the main body of the chowder and flakes into the dish as it cooks.
Salt pork
Renders fat that carries flavour through the pot and adds savoury depth.
Split crackers
Soak up cooking liquid and help give the chowder body.
Rolled crackers or flour
Thickens the gravy so it coats the fish and crackers.
Chopped onions
Adds sweetness and aroma as they soften in the pork fat and liquid.

The step that matters

Simmering the fish slowly. Gentle heat cooks the fish through while keeping its pieces intact. A hard boil would break the fish apart and make the gravy cloudy.

Swap the lemon

The recipe marks lemon as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (fish, pork, pepper, onion, flour, port wine):

  1. Lemonthe original
  2. Plumfits about as well
  3. Limefits about as well
  4. Figfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against fish, pork, pepper, onion, flour, port wine. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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