Serendipitous Substitution - One Flame Fish Stew

Once a month or so in the  autumn and winter we have chowder as a weekday supper. Or dinner. Or tea, depending on class, pretension and region.

I am not a believer in strict recipes unless they are needed. Yesterday's chowder had kippers and basa as the majority of the protein, but lacking bacon (the shame) and with some chorizo to use up I added that, a happy circumstance as it gave a nice paprika spice to the dish. As ever it was bulked out with potatoes and sweetcorn, both of which like onions cook beautifully in the milk that forms a good half of the liquid.

We discussed as we always do if chowder is a soup or a stew - this one was definitely a stew - and if, with chorizo, it actually qualified as chowder at all. That takes me back to the point about strict adherence to recipes. Chowder is said to have originated as a one-pot dish cooked by fishermen (the word chowder derived from the French chaudiere, a big cooking pot or in modern French a boiler), with a bit of the catch, some spuds, bacon and onions cooked in water at sea. Some - me included - use milk plus stock now for the smoked fish version, not a luxury that those driftermen enjoyed, so it is already different from the pure original if indeed such a thing ever existed.

This is not to say that you can bung in whatever comes to hand, some discrimination is needed. My version includes garlic, red pepper and carrot, all chopped finely to cook quickly (the onions likewise, the spuds big dice), to add flavour, 'goodness' and a bit of colour. The chorizo helped with that too, the paprika sending the milk a rather fetching pink.