Enter the characters you see below Sorry, we just need campbell’s condensed pea soup make sure you’re not a robot. This article is about the soup or stew.
Chowder is similar but different to soup or stew. It is often prepared with milk or cream and thickened with broken crackers, crushed ship biscuit, or a roux. The origin of the term chowder is obscure. One possible source is the French word chaudron, the French word for cauldron, the type of cooking or heating stove on which the first chowders were probably cooked. Although in the sixteenth century in Cornwall and Devon a dialect word “jowter” was used to describe hawkers, particularly fish-sellers, with later variants “chowder” and “chowter”, this is not cited by the Oxford English Dictionary as a possible source due to controversy regarding the origins of the dish itself.
Tobias Smollett has one character state, “My head sings and simmers like a pot of chowder”. In Merriam-Webster’s dictionary chowder is defined as “a thick soup or stew made of seafood or corn with potatoes and onions and milk or tomatoes”. Chowder as it is known today originated as a shipboard dish, and was thickened with the use of hardtack. In 1890, in the magazine American Notes and Queries, it was said that the dish was of French origin. Among French settlers in Canada it was a custom to stew clams and fish laid in courses with bacon, sea biscuits, and other ingredients in a bucket called a “chaudière”, and it thus came to be invented.
