The Prize-Winning Chowder Has Flour. The Oldest One Had Wine.

LOWER AND OUTER CAPE · THE CHOWDER ARGUMENT

Mac's menu says no flour. The Lobster Pot's prize bowl has a little. A 1751 recipe used claret and no milk. Pick your side.

6 min read · A Celebrate Lower Cape spotlight

"Local sea clams, potato, leek, onion, thyme." That's the whole chowder line on the menu at Mac's in Chatham this fall, from nine dollars, with "GLUTEN FREE" printed after it in capital letters, like a dare.

Read it twice and you notice what's missing. There's no flour. There's no cream on the list either. Somebody in that kitchen has made a decision, and printed it for anyone ordering to see.

Mac Hay will tell you what the decision was. "Some think chowder is supposed to be so thick a spoon can stand up in it," he told the Cape Cod Times. "That is just more flour."

You know the spoon test. Most families out here have someone who runs it. And on the Lower Cape, as anywhere chowder gets made, the people who run it and the people who'd rather not are both sure they're defending the original. So which bowl is the old one?

Nine dollars, and nothing to hold it up

Hay isn't alone, and his allies are old. "Authentic New England chowders are never thick, however," Charlie Burke wrote in a passage Smithsonian quoted in 2010, "with most relying on the starch from the potatoes." The thick, pasty ones, he added, "are full of flour which masks the flavor of the clams."

Out at the tip, the Provincetown Portuguese Cookbook says much the same thing with more sorrow. The town's old chowders, it says, "were very basic and unencumbered by the celery and the thickeners" that came later. And then the line that sounds like a door closing:

Public taste, it should be said, has a trophy case. The Lobster Pot on Commercial Street ships its chowder nationally, and that listing says it has won a grand prize at the Cape Cod Chowder Festival, among others. The same version lists clam broth, light cream, clams, potatoes, onions and butter. Then, in the fine print, under "Contains 2% Or Less Of": modified cornstarch and wheat flour.

So the prize bowl has flour in it. Barely. Both camps can read that label and feel vindicated, which may be the most Cape Cod thing about it.

A poem with a bottle of claret in it

If you want to know what chowder was before anyone argued about it, the trail goes back to 1751, when someone sent the Boston Evening Post a recipe written as a poem. Atlas Obscura walked through it a few years ago. "First lay some Onions to keep the Pork from burning," it begins. Then fish, herbs, pepper and salt, "Biscuit next, which must be soak'd some Time," and a bottle of claret.

No milk. No potatoes. No clams.

The thickener in the oldest printed New England chowder we found is ship's biscuit, the hardtack sailors carried. A century later Herman Melville sent Ishmael and Queequeg to the Try Pots on Nantucket, where the only question was clam or cod, and the clams were "small juicy clams, scarcely bigger than hazel nuts, mixed with pounded ship biscuit." Still biscuit. Still no flour in sight.

Which would hand the no-flour side the argument, except for a woman in Centerville.

"With a little cold water and flour"

In 1940, the Barnstable Patriot printed a chowder recipe Melissa Hamblin had written in rhyme some thirty years before. The Cape Cod Times found it in the Sturgis Library's digital archive. It calls for "one peck of clams in their shell," and, a few lines on: "With a little cold water and flour make a paste," followed by "Add three pints of hot milk, you must now make haste."

There it is. Flour and milk, in a Cape kitchen, in rhyme, more than a century ago. In the same piece, Hay allowed that pork and flour were long-standing chowder staples, and said the rhyme's recipe would probably come out watery anyway.

So the spoon-test crowd has a grandmother on its side after all. The no-flour crowd has a 1751 poem and a whaling novel. Nobody has the whole truth, and everybody has a document.

Tomatoes, punishable by a barrel of clams

The one thing the whole coast agrees on is what doesn't go in. In the 1930s a Maine state representative named Cleveland Sleeper drafted bills, half in jest, to make tomatoes in clam chowder a crime, according to the New England Historical Society. The penalty he had in mind was digging a barrel of clams at high tide. At a 1939 tasting in Portland he tried a Manhattan bowl and pronounced it "a vegetable soup, not clam chowder." He never filed the bill. The judges sided with him anyway.

Provincetown has its own soup and its own tomato fight. "Kale soup vies with clam chowder as the most popular soup in Provincetown," the same cookbook says, and its purists "scoffed at the addition of ingredients like tomatoes, carrots, wine and garlic." Writing in the Provincetown Independent this spring, Joan Fitzgerald traced the town's version back to caldo verde in northern Portugal and found it had become "its own invention," heartier and redder than the original. Every pot on this end of the Cape, it seems, is somebody's departure from somebody else's tradition.

And some of the best chowder on the Lower Cape was never on a menu. As a First Night tradition, the Cape Cod Commercial Fishermen's Alliance reported in 2020, Chatham fisherman Bill Amaru cooked clam chowder for about 200 people at Chatham's Masonic Lodge. The alliance's account of his recipe ends with the only instruction anyone on either side would sign: "and a lot of butter."

On the menu in Chatham, the thyme. In Provincetown, the cream and a whisper of flour. In Brewster, Uncle Pete's Chowder House says its classic chowder "goes back to Uncle Pete's original 1969 recipe." Somewhere behind all of them, a bottle of claret and a bag of biscuit.

Earlier this month we found the same word on one Chatham clam board, $18 apart. This argument is cheaper to settle, so settle it for us: vote above, and if you remember who taught your family which way was right, tell us in the comments.

KEEP READING

Still hungry? Three more arguments on a plate

The Lower Cape has opinions about what goes in the fryer and the bowl, and the paper trail to back them up.