Nutrition

The Literate Gourmet

Melville and Hawthorne shared notes over chowder

by Jennifer Wolff
[ Updated: Jul 14, 2008 - 4:49:20 PM ]

On November 13, 1851, two men met at the Curtis House in Lenox, Massachusetts, to do something that men of that era simply didn’t do: have dinner in public. So bizarre was this behavior that the Windsor Journal reported the two men dined together at a local hotel “…as if neither had a home to which he could invite the other.” Making it all the more astonishing was that the two men were both celebrated recluses. One, Nathaniel Hawthorne, was known to run out the back door of his Stockbridge home when visitors came calling. His dining companion, Herman Melville, came to town only to pick up his mail. But Melville was desperate that night to hand the very first copy of Moby-Dick to his mentor. It was Hawthorne who had told Melville to turn his whale tale into a more meaningful allegory, but that was after chapter 15, entitled “Chowder”—an homage to a bubbly soup “made of small juicy clams, scarcely bigger than hazel nuts, mixed with pounded ship biscuits and salted pork cut up into little flakes!”—already had a home in the text. The soup Melville describes isn’t the creamy, starchy, potato-laden version of modern chowders, but rather a far fresher and natural sort of potage, thick with the makings of its own stock, and as Ishmael himself attests, “surpassingly excellent.”