Instructions: On cold, wet, windy days, especially on the coast, nothing satisfies like a warm, hearty chowder, rich with seafood swimming in a hot, briny stock and laced with mellow vegetables.

What we usually get, even along our own Oregon coast, where every restaurant claims its chowder is "award-winning," is a thick, over-salted, floury goo with a few gummy, tiny pieces of canned clams, a concoction better suited to spackling a wall.

Theres no excuse for this, because nothing is as easy to make as a basic clam chowder. Even at its most rudimentary, it is tasty and filling. Made with canned clams (which is what restaurants peddling the paste versions obviously use), it is very inexpensive. With a few embellishments and more expensive ingredients - such as good fish stock and fresh seafood - a chowder can rise to stellar heights. A cook has to go to perverse lengths to mess it up.

In spite of the many mediocre versions served at restaurants, chowder recipes are suddenly popular in books and magazines. One of the newest titles, Jasper Whites "Fifty Chowders," is a beautiful and helpful, if somewhat redundant, book.

Martha Stewart recently aired a seafood chowder segment on her television show, and the better cooking magazines have recently devoted features on chowders of various kinds.

Yearning to be humble
Part of the renewed popularity may be the much vaunted return to simple, humble American foods with historical roots. Seafood chowder, which was immortalized in Melvilles "Moby-Dick," has long been a staple of Americas fishing communities.

The dish was traditionally a way to use up an abundant catch (today it can be a way to extend expensive fish). The word chowder apparently came from the French "chaudiere" or pot, and Websters New World defines it as

"a thick soup made variously, but usually containing onion, potatoes and salt pork, sometimes corn, tomatoes, or other vegetables, and often, specifically, clams or fish and milk."

Purists insist that chowder is a main dish and should not be served as a soup before an entree.

Along with corn chowder, you may see recipes for meat chowders, but these are considered to be more of a stew. Besides, the very word chowder conjures up the taste of seafood.

Thicken with hardtack
Printed recipes go back to 1751, but Jasper White notes that the Micmac tribes of New England may have been the first to cook chowder, teaching the dish to French and English settlers and fishermen.

The first printed chowder recipes called for thickening with sea biscuits or hardtack and didnt call for milk. It wasnt until the Civil War era that milk and potatoes became common in some chowders, therefore initiating the silly chauvinism between various regions as to whether a "true" chowder is cream- or tomato-based.

The spicy, tomato-based chowders we know today (not the thin, bland version found in cans) were probably developed by Italian fishermen about the same time the milk versions were being cooked elsewhere,. They were likely an adaptation of the Italian zuppa con vingole, or soup of clams.

The regional chauvinism attached to chowders can get even sillier when menu writers try to get creative. The creamy chowder is usually referred to as Boston or New England clam chowder, and the tomato variety is called Manhattan or Coney Island clam chowder. But what does "Rhode Island" clam chowder mean in Cannon Beach or "Nova Scotia" chowder in, say, Lincoln City?

It means, ask your waiter.

Good ingredients, good soup
What is not silly but a culinary blessing is the variety of seafood chowders created regionally. When the local recipe is one that uses the freshest local fish and vegetables, chowders are at their best.

Even with all the regional differences, there are simple, basic truths about all seafood chowders. The most fundamental is that the quality of the chowder is directly proportional to the quality of the stock. This doesnt contradict the fact that a chowder can be tasty at its simplest; it just means the better the stock, the better the flavor.

Likewise, chowder doesnt have to be thick. If the broth is good and rich, the potatoes will add enough starch to the dish. Not that theres anything wrong with a creamy chowder - if its tasty and the fish are apparent.

The idea that a chowder has to be thickened with flour until gummy enough to stand a spoon up in it and that any incidental pieces of fish are hidden by the white paste is nothing short of a blasphemy. You deserve better.

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