Herman Melville, 1870. Oil painting by Joseph Oriel Eaton

Melville lived in Manhattan and New England, did he prefer to eat Red or White chowder?

By Joel Clark

In 1819, Herman Melvill(e), he later added the “e”, was born into lavish living at the southern tip of Manhattan Island, at 6 Pearl Street. His family possessed all the trappings of the wealthy lifestyle, the things you could see today in SoHo or the West Village, back in time 200 years. With carriages, servants, and refined preparatory schooling, his first eleven years only he dwelt in this moneyed paradise.

The wharves of lower Manhattan, 1908, painted by CFW Mielatz

It was in that fateful eleventh year, that Herman’s father Allan finally went broke, at that point owing something around $500,000 in today’s dollars to creditors and business partners, and moved the family to then-rural Albany, and his eight children were put to work in local timber mills, fur warehouses and factories—sullen little Herman was even a bank teller at the age of 14.

Herman would snag bits of education where he could, but for the most part, read books on his own after long hours on the factory floor. His classical education, which terminated in that eleventh year, consisted mainly of Greek tragedies, oratory, and debate—and would have a strong effect on his later writing, but Herman would find his greatest inspiration in the new, hard-scrabble life into which he was so jarringly thrown.

The greatest effect of these financial woes, this step down the ladder for the Melvill(e) family, manifested itself as a three years’ whaling voyage as a common sailor, at the age of 22.

Melville took to the sea “before the mast,” meaning he and the other working men slept below decks at the front of the ship, reserving the stern for more important officers and mates. He served aboard merchant vessels first—a silent, sullen boy whose duties consisted of sweeping the deck and shoveling out livestock stables below decks—and with just a little experience under his belt, Melville went to sea, a whaler for the first and only time, in the Acushnet, a three-masted ship out of New Bedford, MA, in 1840.

The forecastle of a three-masted ship

This voyage, this high-stakes low wage employment, would become several voyages, since the young hero/rascal Herman deserted the Acushnet in the Marquesas, a remote island chain of Polynesia, and served in several other vessels before returning home. This life-changing trek, which ended up taking four years, would generate least four books—Typee, Omoo, White-Jacket, and his most famous work, the book at first called simply The Whale, published in 1851.

The dangers of whaling

Drawing from this rough-and-tumble, overworked adulthood, flavored by the classics he read as a boy, Melville’s unique strength was his effortless description of real, gritty, working-class stories with beautifully transcendent lines, drawing from Euripides and Shakespeare to carve from his experiences the rough-hewn characters, the men Herman met and worked alongside on the wide oceans of the world. It was on the sea, and near it in the ports of New England and Manhattan, that Melville ate chowder.

Oh, sweet friends! hearken to me. It was made of small juicy clams, scarcely bigger than hazel nuts, mixed with pounded ship biscuit, and salted pork cut up into little flakes; the whole enriched with butter, and plentifully seasoned with pepper and salt.

—Moby-Dick, Chapter 15, “Chowder”

Fish and clam chowders developed naturally in the scarcity of the early colonial days—a simple recipe calling for clams/cod, of which there were plenty, ship’s biscuit, usually too hard to bite into, so best to mash into a roux, salt pork if you had any, potatoes, onion, and lots of butter. These were simple soups cooked in large quantities with whatever was around—the word chowder likely comes from the French chaudière, the name of a type of stew-pot. In the whaling ports of the world, chowders simmered in the very pots whale-blubber had been rendered on a busier day. Chowder was, and mostly still is, a humble dish of dockworkers and fishermen. In Melville’s time, its status matched the humble lobster.

Rivington Street, ca. 1910

If you can believe it, the prestige of the lobster is relatively new. The then-plentiful meat of the lobster was once served in prisons, sold for practically nothing on the dirty streets of early New York and Boston, and even thrown to the birds. How did the lobster push itself upward, into a higher tax bracket as a foodstuff? Chowder wants to know.

Chowder’s popularity rapidly spread in early America, mostly due to its cheap, filling quality, and no fewer than eight regional recipes were tried out, perfected, and established along nascent America’s only coast. And it was in Melville’s birthplace where the most controversial recipe was engendered—that most infamous Manhattan clam chowder—that recipe which sacrilegiously calls for a tomato-based broth. The horror–!

New England became embroiled in a mild uproar. Which, for New England, is a big deal. The state of Maine considered legislation banning the use of tomatoes in chowder in 1939. In 1940, the definitive burn was made by the publication A New England Sampler: “Tomatoes and clams have no more affinity than ice cream and horseradish.” OUCH.

Melville, like chowder, was pulled to and from New York City to New England, and the two roots in him were often at odds. Melville’s hero and brief friend Nathaniel Hawthorne typified the gothic New England literature that Melville and the literary community around him revered. These books mirrored themes and structures of British and French novels, perhaps a little too well. Melville’s writing, on the other hand, his body and mind, his spirit—all were far too coarse, too battered by his real-world experiences, to produce this type of instant classic. His work was in a darker mood.

Laborers in New York, ca. 1910

Though trapped in a farmhouse in rural Massachusetts, where he was writing Moby-Dick, Herman’s restless mind still roamed the Manhattan wharves. He still lay in the forecastle, resting after a long watch with overtired and overlooked laborers at the bottom of society’s ladder. His visions of humanity, though expressed in his high-soaring prose, were far more democratic, far more inclusive than the rigid, polemic works of his day. Sales suffered, to be sure, but in the long term, we all reap the benefit from his daily wrestlings with the pen.

Melville’s contemporaries weren’t ready. Like the government of Maine taking radical steps against tomato-infused chowders, the literary world excommunicated the struggling genius. Moby-Dick was reviewed poorly and sold worse. Melville’s subsequent books faired no better, and he retired into ignominy, serving as a clerk in a custom-house, back on the docks of his first home, the ever-industrializing and the now-gloomy island of Manhattan.

A Push-Cart Market, ca. 1910

Gone were the luxurious days of his childhood, the servants and schools, the playmates, carriages, and fine clothes. Melville was back home, but worked until nightfall on the docks, wrote feebly by candlelight in the cold attic at 104 East 26^th Street, where he died of a heart attack at age 72. He’s buried at the Woodlawn Cemetary in Brooklyn.

Melville’s greatest was rediscovered only thirty or so years after his death in the early 1920s, by scholars, students, and critics. Soon it would be said that Moby-Dick may the greatest novel written in English—though at the same time many might argue that the book isn’t a novel at all, but an expression of a form stranger, more radical and transcendent.

Maybe we can call it a tomato chowder. It may be sacrilege—but it may be a genius.

***

If you wish to try clam or fish chowder in the oldest way possible—here is the first known fish chowder recipe, published September 23, 1751, in rhyme:

First, lay some Onions to keep the Pork from burning

Because in Chouder there can be not turning;
Then lay some Pork in slices very thin,
Thus you in Chouder always must begin.
Next lay some Fish cut crossways very nice
Then season well with Pepper, Salt, and Spice;
Parsley, Sweet-Marjoram, Savory, and Thyme,
Then Biscuit next which must be soak’d some Time.
Thus your Foundation laid, you will be able
To raise a Chouder, high as Tower of Babel;
For by repeating o’er the Same again,
You may make a Chouder for a thousand men.
Last a Bottle of Claret, with Water eno; to smother ’em,
You’ll have a Mess which some call Omnium gather ’em.

*All images courtesy of the Library of Congress

(Source: Joel Clark is a Moby Dick / Herman Melville scholar. Joel normally wears the hat of a Hollywood screenwriter, with six films under his belt to date. His most acclaimed project: “Man From Reno” Award Winner Best Narrative Feature at LA Film Festival & a John Cassavetes Award Nominee / Film Independent Spirit Awards, He also fills in the gaps as a freelance book editor, for a large publishing house.)

New England-Style Clam Chowder Recipe (white)