New England cuisine is strongly based on fish, seafood and dairy products.
New England traditional chowders come from the French thick soups made with fish, seafood, and vegetables. The word chaudiere is the French name for the big copper pot in which those soups were prepared, hence the name chowder.
The New England clam chowder has a lovely creamy base.
New England foods
Maple syrup, apples and cheddar cheese from Vermont.
Cranberries, cod, haddock and clams from Massachussets.
Maine lobster, boiled, broiled, steamed, stuffed or in lobster cakes or lobster Alfredo. Lobster was once so abundant that it was used as fertilizer, not food.
New Haven, Connecticut, is supposed to have seen the birth of the hamburger.
…and food events
In Connecticut, look for the Lobster Weekend at Mystic, in May, or the Oyster Festival in the city of Norwalk, on Labor Day, celebrating the history of the city’s oyster industry.
Enoy the clam festival at Yarmouth, Maine, in July.
Recipes from New England
Apple crisp, CT - Basic apple sauce, CT - Best apple pie, CT - Boston baked beans, MA - Coffee milkshake RI - Easy old fashioned meatloaf, MA - Election Day cake, CT - Maine lobster, ME - New England clam chowder
New England states
Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Vermont.
Do you know what quahogs are?
Quahogs are hard shell clams native to the Atlantic coast of America. Quahogs grow from Canada to Florida, but they are more abundant in the stretch between Cape Cod and New Jersey. They are also known as round clams or chowder clams.
In local fish markets or restaurants you will find specialist names for different sizes of hard clam, corresponding to their different uses in cooking. The smallest clams are called littlenecks, medium clams are called cherrystones, and the largest are called quahogs or chowder clams.
Visiting New England you’ll come along raw bars specialized in serving littlenecks and cherrystones raw, as you would oysters, on an opened half-shell, with a cocktail sauce, horseradish, or just lemon.
Sometimes, cherrystones are steamed and dipped in butter, but this treatment is more common for other New England clams, the soft-shelled steamers.