Fish Chowder

History

This fish chowder is recipe No. 127 in "What Mrs. Fisher Knows About Old Southern Cooking," published in San Francisco in 1881 by Abby Fisher. Fisher could neither read nor write and dictated her recipes to friends; she brought the book forward, in her own words, "based on an experience of upwards of thirty-five years" in Southern cooking, pickling, and preserving.

Her book is among the earliest cookbooks by an African-American woman — long believed to be the first, until Malinda Russell's 1866 "Domestic Cook Book" was rediscovered. Fisher was born in 1831 and worked as a plantation cook in Orangeburg, South Carolina, before moving with her family to San Francisco in 1877, where she ran a pickle-and-preserves business under her own name, "Mrs. Abby Fisher & Co." Genealogical research in San Francisco records identifies her mother as Abbie Clifton and her father as James J. Andrews, an Orangeburg planter who held some seventy people in slavery, and an 1869 receipt from the Freedman's Savings and Trust in Mobile records her under her mother's name. Before 1865, censuses recorded only an enslaver's name with the age and sex of those he held, so no surviving record names Fisher herself; the food historian Karen Hess, who rediscovered and researched the book, noted that absence of documentation. Her cooking carried enough recognized authority to earn two medals at the San Francisco Mechanics' Institute Fair in 1880 and a diploma at the Sacramento State Fair in 1879.

The recipe itself layers about six pounds of fish with fried salt pork, beaten sea cracker, and sliced Irish potatoes, seasoned with butter, cayenne, and salt, then stewed in a pint of water for an hour. This matches the documented profile of American chowder of the era: a period dictionary quoted in the word's etymology defines chowder as "A favorite dish in New England, made of fish, pork, onions, and biscuit stewed together," the name itself descending from the French chaudière, "a pot." Beyond that general dish-type, the historical record does not document a specific earlier origin for Fisher's own version — it is the fish chowder as she cooked it and set it down, in her own name.

Ingredients

• 1 pound salt pork
• 6 pounds fish
• 6 Irish potatoes
• 1 sea cracker
• 1 large onion
• 1 tablespoonful butter
• cayenne pepper
• salt
• 1 pint water

Instructions

1. Beat one sea cracker fine and set aside.
2. Slice one large onion and chop it fine.
3. Cut one pound of salt pork into pieces one to two inches in size.
4. Fry the pork brown in a pot, then remove it and set aside, reserving the fat.
5. Cut the fish into pieces the same size as the pork.
6. Slice six Irish potatoes into pieces the size of the fish.
7. In the pot with the pork fat on the fire, layer a portion of fish on the bottom.
8. Layer a portion of fried pork over the fish.
9. Layer a portion of beaten cracker over the pork.
10. Add one tablespoonful of butter, cayenne pepper, and salt to taste.
11. Pour in one pint of water.
12. Let the chowder stew for one hour until ready for table use.