A Good Chowder Is A Big Chowder (So Make Extra, Just In Case)

I am large, I contain multitudes.

Walt Whitman, "Song of Myself"

For a long time, I used to cook little meals in little pots, the smallest meals that would fill me up, cooked in the smallest pots that would do the job. I was often wrong about how small a meal would fill me up and how small a pot would do the job, and when I was wrong, things boiled over and made a mess of the stove, or in the course of adding ingredients I would reach a point where the next ingredient wouldn't fit in the pot and I would have to transfer the whole hot concoction to a larger pot, or when I'd finished eating the little meal I'd made, the pot would be empty, but I wouldn't have had enough. Why did I persist in that particular folly, always making little meals in little pots? I was reacting against my mother's cauldron.

My mother's cauldron was an enormous soup pot that looked like a prop from the witches' scene in Macbeth. She actually called it a cauldron, and she used it to make clam chowder. She had other pots, but only that one would do for chowder. She could have made enough for the six of us in a smaller pot, and she could have made much less chowder than she did. She would have had an easier time of it if she had, because the cauldron was really too big and heavy for her to handle, but she stuck with that cauldron and wouldn't use anything else. It embarrassed me. I thought it made us look like peasants and made her look like a witch. I wanted her to get rid of that cauldron or disguise it as a planter.

I couldn't manage to tell her any of that directly, of course, so I tried to be subtle. One day when she was making chowder I asked, "Ma, why don't you use a smaller pot?" You see how subtle I could be in those days.

She looked at me with her brows knit and said, "A smaller pot?"

"Yeah." I said. "You wouldn't have to struggle with it the way you do with this thing."

"I couldn't use a smaller pot," she said, and she waved the idea off as preposterous.

"You could," I said. "You could use a smaller pot. Look. Look at all that chowder. That's more chowder than we can eat. Lots more."

She put her hands on her hips and shook her head, and she smiled the indulgent smile of a mother who sees that her daughter has a lot to learn. "You've got a lot to learn," she said.

"Maaa!" I said, and I frowned the impatient frown of a daughter who is convinced that her mother has nothing to teach her.

"Look," she said. "You see how much extra chowder there is in this cauldron?"

"I sure do."

"That has to be there. There has to be some extra, in case."

Old-Fashioned Shortcake

Ingredients:

2 cups all purpose flour

4 tsp. baking powder

1 tsp. kosher salt

2 Tbsp. plus 2 tsp. sugar

7 Tbsp. sweet butter, cold

1 large egg

1/2 cup milk

Method:

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Butter a nine-inch round cake pan very well.

Mix together the flour, baking powder, salt, and two tablespoons of the sugar. Cut three tablespoons of butter into nine pieces. With the paddle of an electric mixer, or by pinching it between your fingers, combine the butter with the dry ingredients until the mixture resembles coarse meal.

In a separate bowl beat the egg, then beat the milk into it. Fold the egg into the flour mixture one quarter at a time, turning it with a rubber spatula after the last addition, until all the flour is incorporated.

Spread half the dough in the cake pan. Cut the remaining four tablespoons of butter into small pieces and dot the dough with it. Spread the rest of the dough over the butter with your fingers. Sprinkle the remaining two teaspoons of sugar on top.

Bake until the top of the shortcake is golden and firm, about 30 minutes. Turn it out of the pan and cool it right side up on a wire rack. It will be about one inch high.

When the shortcake is cool, slice it with a long-bladed serrated knife into two layers. Assemble with fruits and sauces of your choice.

Serves 8 to 10.