A thick soup, usually made with seafood and milk.
“The chowder in the cauldron was high in calories.” This short sentence contains three culinary terms that derive from the Latin verb calere, meaning to be hot. This Latin verb gave rise to a Latin noun, calidarium, the name of a tub in which Romans took hot baths. In French calidarium evolved into cauderon, adopted by English in the early fourteenth century as caudron, a huge kitchen pot. The name of this pot remained caudron for two hundred years until, in the fifteenth century, scholars decided to make the word look more like its Latin source by adding an / to form cauldron. By developing along another path, the Latin calidarium also evolved into the word chowder: specifically, the Latin plural of calidarium—calidaria—became the French chaudiere, meaning kettle. Chaudiere then became part of a phrase—faire la chaudiere—spoken by French fishermen after they had spent the day dragging their nets along the coast of Newfoundland and New England. This phrase, literally meaning to make the kettle, referred to the communal pot into which every fishing crew would throw some of its catch. Eventually the word chaudiere was transferred from the pot to the fish soup it contained, and it was with this sense that English finally borrowed the word in the mid eighteenth century, spelling it chowder. A hundred years later, in the mid nineteenth century, English derived yet another word from the Latin calere: calorie, a unit of heat used to measure how much energy a human can derive from a given food.
A densely textured broth or concoction initially prepared in the northeastern region of the United States, specifically New England, that consists of piscine meat, tubers, and a dairy component, namely milk or cream.
This culinary creation, which originated in France, has become linked with New England and Newfoundland. It is a hearty soup or stew that is typically composed of shellfish, particularly clams, or other types of fish, paired with pork or bacon to add richness and depth of flavor.