Tidal estuaries thread the village of Essex, famous for a strip of road that meets the Essex River with antiques and fried clams. For a quarter mile, every other building on the salt marsh-banked road offers either some of the world’s best old furniture or the best clams, which supposedly were first dipped in cornmeal and dropped in hot oil right here a hundred years ago.
Essex clams are legend, both fried and in chowder, the creamy kind piled high with clams and cubed potatoes. To win the Essex Clam Chowder Festival, held last weekend on the ballfields behind the Police Station, is to throw open one’s restaurant doors to fame. It’s an event imbued with red-blooded American-ness – clam diggers! New England Classicism! Yankee Magazine Moments! Wasn’t Sal’s mother making clam chowder in Robert McCloskey’s book, “One Morning in Maine?” Politicians love showing up at the Essex festival to kiss babies and slurp chowder samples.
Just about everyone was having their photo taken with Congressman John Tierney and Senator Scott Brown. But, State Senator Bruce Tarr, ever jolly and happy to have a good meal, sat at the judges table. And so did I. I had the honor – yes, it really is an honor – to be asked to help judge the eleven restaurants and caterers who had shown up with their liters of clam chowder hoping to be crowned the best.
We were eight judges tasting the eleven participating clam chowders blindly. In front of each of us was set a round tray holding eleven small plastic cups of chowder, each numbered 1-11. We had a pen, paper, and a cute judges hat. Our job was to taste each chowder and rate it on a scale of 1-10, 10 being the best.
Outside the tennis court where this was all going on, a line of people snaked up to the street. That was the crowds waiting to come in and taste the chowders and judge for themselves, because along with the judge’s blind choice, there’s the people’s vote, which I was told is often the reverse of the judges’. What is number two for the judges is often number one for the people.
Taste. Think. Taste. Think. Taste. Think. You get the picture. When all eight judges were ready, Tarr called out the number of each chowder and each of us returned how we rated it. What was stunning in both a statistical and gastronomic way was that, with only one or two wild deviations, there was almost no gap between judges’ votes. What was a 4 for one judge was in most cases a 4 - or maybe a 5 – for the rest. We tallied the numbers for each, revealing - drumroll…. Ipswich Clambake the winner!
The Windward Grille was our second. Yup, they were first in The People’s vote.
I called Michelle Pepin who owns the Ipswich Clambake with her husband, Tom (he makes the chowder), and begged for the recipe. While Tom and Michelle vigilantly defended their recipe’s privacy, Michelle released their chowder philosophy.
“Tom believes in a medium thickness to his chowder, and loads it with clams.”
Clams, potato, onion, cream, and more clams. That seems to be the winning key to the chowder Tom Pepin has been making for twenty years.
My personal take on chowder after seriously comparing eleven variations is that much depends on the quality of the cream – it should taste very fresh, and not be too thickened with starch from the potatoes (or, god forbid, commercial clam base), and not be too thinned by the clam broth. It’s also about salt. Too salty and not salty enough both stood out.
Tom Pepin uses both light cream and heavy cream in that winning chowder, no milk. That’s as much of a recipe as we’ll get, but the Pepins were thrilled to win – even shocked, Michelle reported. Essex is a tough chowder festival to win in, she says. As well it should be, with all those sweet clams digging themselves into the Essex River mud as I write this.
Congratulations to Ipswich Clambake and the Windward Grille!
