Giant Clams, Atlantic Sturgeon, and a Chowder Recipe
There are no sturgeon or giant clams in the chowder
Hi all! You may have noticed that I haven’t sent out a letter in a minute, which is I guess one of the upsides of doing this for free! Going forward, the plan is to try to get out at least 2 per-month, which feels doable while keeping up with my other work. Until I start shaking you down for a (very small) monthly fee, I guess I reserve the right to suddenly devote large amounts of my free time to, e.g., watching the Mets in the playoffs. This week, I’ll tell you a little bit about my fall, advertise some upcoming tours, and go over a few news stories about the sea. Then, I’ll give you my fish chowder recipe, which is the first Landlubber recipe for something that isn’t fish stock.
In a particularly busy fall, a really bright spot for me was a small bird tour I led with a group of people who had, after long periods of incarceration, won their freedom and come back home to New York City. They got out of prison with help from an org called the Parole Preparation Project, which assists incarcerated people ahead of parole board hearings. The population Parole Prep works with skews older, and most of the people they help have been in prison for decades on sentences they received when they were young. Basically, they assist with parole applications and help incarcerated people prepare to go in front of the parole board, a process that can take years.
Parole Prep has helped over 400 people come home since they started that work, and they’re expanding into litigation work and policy advocacy (pushing for laws that would, e.g., make it easier for judges to give people humane sentences, make it easier to overturn bad convictions, and make it easier for elderly people incarcerated in NY to win their freedom). Anyway, leading a walk with that group was the highlight of my fall, and I’m hoping to do a handful of those every year from now on! I learned about the organization last year at the Parole Prep Welcome Home Party, which is an annual fundraiser but also a celebration of all of the people who were freed that year and an opportunity to hear from them. It’s a lot of fun and the speeches by the people who recently came home are incredibly moving. It will make you cry and want to drop everything you’re doing to volunteer. If you’re short on time, but want to support that cause, I can think of no better place to send some money.
I’ve also been doing bird walks for NYC Bird Alliance and a few other organizations, and working as a naturalist on boat tours up the Hudson River with Classic Harbor Line.
I have the last fall foliage (BALD EAGLE) tour coming up on Sunday (tickets here!), and then free NYC Bird Alliance tours in Marine Park on 11/9 (today, actually, I just did that one), and Snug Harbor on 11/12. Registration for those is especially helpful if you want to borrow binoculars or receive my updates about transportation issues etc., which I try to send out the day before. You can also always reach out to hire me as a bird guide (or purchase those services as a gift for someone else) by responding to this email.
Coming Attraction: WINTER BOAT TOUR
This winter, Classic Harbor Line is going to start doing winter nature cruises called Seals, Seabirds, and Winter Wildlife, and they’re going to be really cool. The boat will leave from Chelsea Piers and take us down the Hudson, through the narrows, and out into the Lower New York Bay in January and February where we’ll see loons, sea ducks, gannets (amazing seabirds in video above), and seals. The boats are very cozy and nice and have a full bar. I’m doing a lot of them in January and February. Local nature genius Gabriel Willow will be doing some before he heads down to lead winter birding trips in warmer, more tropical climates (if you’re interested in those, you should check out his website here! He’s taking a group to Colombia this winter, and if there are still open spots, I definitely recommend going).
I’ll do a letter about winter wildlife in New York Harbor at some point before they start, but we’ll see some of my favorite animals on the winter tours, and the trips will include, as always, some kind of complimentary beverage as well as commentary about the natural and environmental history of the city, the coast, and our fascinating, fraught history with marine wildlife. You can buy tickets for these as early as right now, and they make pretty great holiday gifts in my opinion. If you’re local to NYC, or buying gifts for someone who is, grabbing a winter nature cruise now is way better than running around the Union Square holiday market on December 23rd, which is what I always do. Here’s a link to book the tickets!
NEWSLUBBER
I was originally planning on sending out a long letter about the environmental history of New England that included seals, and seabirds, but that letter is a little grim and it’s been a tough week so instead, for now, the first ever Newslubber, which is what I’m calling this round-up of environmental and maritime stories I’ve been reading or following recently.
Last month, in the great nation of Colombia, scientists and conservationists met for COP16, a conference about global risks to biodiversity and life on earth in general. Among the work presented was a grim assessment of the status of the Giant Clam Tridacna gigas. The species was moved to the IUCN Red List, which unlike CITES, comes with no legal protections. It’s a dire situation these amazing animals are in. Basically, they’re going extinct due to a combination of crappy conditions in the ocean and poaching.
Giant clams form incredible habitats, attracting sponges and corals and all kinds of other sessile (non moving) organisms in shallow sunlit seas. They serve as ballast for lighter organisms, anchoring them down, and as shelter for fish and crabs in otherwise barren, exposed sea floors. One of the environments they thrive in is depleted coral reefs, where they presumably take advantage of excess calcium and other minerals in the water to build their enormous shells. During the day, they open up to farm the little photosynthetic dinoflagellates they cultivate as food: a kind of ecosystem within an ecosystem that’s complex and specialized in the way that only very old ones can be. Like everything with deep evolutionary roots, they’re a testament to the amazing, complex relationships that can only develop between animals over long time periods. At Landlubber, we love mollusks and hate extinction, but these clams are particularly special to me. I remember being a child and staring at one of their huge shells in the American Museum of Natural History and then finding out, to my delight, that unlike the big dinosaurs I’d walked past at the entrance, these amazing, enormous things were still around. The idea that they might disappear before I ever see one alive is heartbreaking.
It looks like in the coming weeks, the SS United States will be scuttled. While I love an opportunity to use the word scuttled (a nautical term that means deliberately sunk) I’m not as gassed about losing this gem of an ocean liner. The SS U.S. is a midcentury beauty that recalls the tasteful maritime grandeur that eventually gave way the hideous superyachts and floating amusement parks that you’ll see on the water today. I have no nostalgia for the 1950’s, but I think the ship is worth preserving because it’s old, and it’s beautiful, and it’s interesting, and well-made. Basically, we shouldn’t sink her for the same reasons we shouldn’t demolish homes built by Frank Lloyd Wright. Speaking of which: I also enjoyed this article about the sputtering effort to preserve Wright’s only skyscraper, Price Tower, in Oklahoma City. Maybe the lesson is that it’s hard to preserve huge things?
Anyway, the ship will have a second life of sorts. Like the old “redbird” subway cars that were dumped in the water off of Delaware, the SS United States will become an “artificial reef” on the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, providing substrate for barnacles, oysters, sponges, and algae to cling to, and serving as habitat for fish and other sea creatures. For a while, the non-profit responsible for trying to preserve the ship was looking for a home, but I think that ship has, so to speak, sailed
Riverkeeper Sues New York, Delaware, and New Jersey over Sturgeon Deaths
Hudson Riverkeeper, which is an organization I’ve always admired, is teaming up with its counterparts in the Delaware River to sue the state governments of New York, New Jersey, and Delaware for neglecting to protect Atlantic Sturgeon. The legal side of it is a little outside my wheelhouse, but the general idea is that there are special obligations to monitor and limit the killing of endangered species and those states aren’t doing any of that stuff.
They’re incredible, 150-plus million year old animals with bizarre, bony plates (called scutes!) that run along their backs. They look about like what you’d get if you crossed a stegosaurus and a catfish, and they can grow over 15-feet long. Atlantic sturgeon swim up from the ocean to spawn in brackish and fresh water, a biological trait called anadromy that’s shared by striped bass, American shad, and a bunch of small fish in the herring family around New York. Working on the Hudson River, where there are estimated to be just over 400 of these fish left, I’ve been lucky enough to see the occasional sturgeon leap out of the water. You never know when it’s going to happen but suddenly, out of nowhere, a fish the size of you will heave its enormous body into the air before crashing back against the surface. The first time I saw one breach I assumed it was a seal.
Breaching behavior is common in a handful of marine animals (whales, sharks) but usually it’s done during feeding. In sturgeon, which mostly feed on the bottom, those leaps are still mysterious. Some scientists believe it has to do with shedding eggs into the water, while others have speculated that it could be a strategy the fish use to keep track of each other in murky brackish currents. Others think it might just be for fun. Either way, people have beaten these creatures down to single-digit percentages of their pre-colonial populations and it would be a real stain on our legacy if we let them disappear entirely.
Tracy Brown, Hudson Riverkeeper president said at a recent press briefing on the lawsuit:
The Atlantic Sturgeon, an ancient sentinel of the Hudson River, stands on the brink of extinction due to a failure of regulatory oversight. Our legal action is not merely about enforcing compliance; it’s about confronting a systemic failure that has jeopardized a species teetering on the edge of disappearance. The states of New York, New Jersey, and Delaware have had ample time to rectify their violations and protect these critical fish, yet they have failed to act decisively. We are determined to see that the promises of the Endangered Species Act are upheld and that the Atlantic Sturgeon can once again thrive in their historic habitats
Gill nets (which are basically walls of netting left out overnight to snare fish by the gills) and trawl nets (the kind you’ve probably seen in movies that drag behind ships) are believed to be responsible for most of the bycatch deaths. In theory, the state agencies that monitor fisheries are supposed to collect data so that they know where sturgeon are being killed and how many, but they aren’t doing that. My guess (and my hope) is that the courts will quickly find that these states are violating the Endangered Species Act. I hope there’s a resolution that benefits the sturgeon themselves (rather than just shifting money), and that provides a window for fishermen to keep making a living.
The reason sturgeon are special to me is that they’re deep time incarnate. They’ve been around for nearly 200 million years, and they’re still mysterious. We know that they live in the ocean for much of the year, where they make incredible journeys up and down the coast, and in some cases, as far east as Iceland. We know that they spawn in murky, brackish water upriver from the sea. We know they swim on the bottom a lot of the time, and eat all kinds of stuff down there, from small invertebrates, to forage fish like sand lances, to decaying organic matter. But there’s a lot we don’t know! The fish are divided into subpopulations by river system, and display pretty vast differences in behavior and lifespan across their range, which encompasses most of the Atlantic Coast of North America. Scientists believe they might form smaller, tighter groups loyal to specific spawning areas and even different spawning seasons. The implication is that if we let these fish disappear from any specific area we’re losing not only those sturgeon but their entire society–a unique subgroup with its own behaviors and natural wisdom.
Of the 38 rivers they historically spawned in, Atlantic sturgeon have been completely wiped out in 16, mostly by damming and excess harvest in the last century-plus. Losing any animal species is awful, but losing an ancient, mysterious creature is a real tragedy. Humans have been around for about 300,000 years (or, if you want to be generous and include some of our ape-like ancestors, six million years). I think there’s a principle here that goes beyond our usual obligations to the natural world, and we owe it to sturgeon to make sure these ancient creatures don’t go extinct because of us.
Alright, that’s all for news this week. Now soup:
My Fish Chowder Recipe:
A few months ago, I sent out a fish stock recipe. I love making stock, but it’s not really a dish as much as an ingredient. You make stock to make other stuff! Chowder (especially on a cold November night) always felt like the highest use of homemade stock: a way to respect the fish and its involuntary sacrifice by stretching it out into many hearty, nourishing meals.
Everyone thinks that there’s some ironclad rule about chowder where it falls either into New England style (made with cream), or Manhattan style (made with tomatoes), but after cooking many chowders many different ways, I’ve come to the conclusion that the distinction is actually pretty stupid. Tomatoes? Great. Cream? Great. Chowder is not some minimalist food for scraping by in bad times: it’s a dish borne of natural abundance that comes with coastal living, and while once, in the early days of chowder, New England coastlines probably had better access to fresh dairy than New York City’s sooty port towns, those days are long gone. When I make chowder, I usually use both tomatoes and cream, which creates a chowder with a gorgeous saffron color.
There are lots of ways to make chowder, but I always use potatoes, onions, dry white wine, and some pork that will render a little fat (I’ve used salt pork, which sometimes renders not quite enough fat, and bacon, which sometimes renders too much). As far as other ingredients go, I believe in having fun. Add corn. If you have access to other fresh stuff, throw it in. Pull out a can of beans! Change a couple of things and call it your chowder recipe if you want. That’s basically what I’ve done! This recipe uses pickled pepperoncini peppers and some of their juice, which, as far as I know, is my own personal contribution to chowder.
I’ll just assume you’re buying your stock where you buy your fish, but if you’re going fishing this fall, fish chowder is way better if you make the stock with the fish you use! If you’re going to the store, there’s a mini fish-buying guide below the recipe.
Ingredients:
Salt pork or Bacon
Unsalted butter (half stick)
Two onions, diced
Two or three pounds of potatoes, peeled and cubed. An easy rule for how big to make these is: don’t make a piece any larger or smaller than what you would want them to be on a soup spoon, because that’s where they’re going to end up. I make mine about an inch by an inch.
Two or three celery stalks, cut according to the same rule (I slice the long way once, then chop them into small pieces at a slight incline, so there are no right angles.)
Thyme, leaves removed and diced. (You can use a lot of thyme if it’s fresh—most of the leaves from a large sprig—but if you’re using dried/crushed thyme, just use a very small pinch. If you don’t have fresh thyme and you have a heavy hand (I say this because I am like that) just leave it out. Too much dried thyme is a problem and no thyme isn’t really a big deal)
A bay leaf or two.
1/2 cup dry white wine. (Another rule I follow but you can ignore if you feel like it is: take a sip before you cook with it, and don’t cook your food with wine you wouldn’t drink a glass of! It shouldn’t be nice or expensive but you shouldn’t want to spit it out either)
A large can of plum tomatoes, roughly chopped/set aside with juices. You could also use a can of chopped tomatoes, but in my experience you get more tomato and less tomato juice if you use the whole canned tomatoes and chop them yourself.
Pickled spicy pepperoncini peppers, chopped finely. Maybe 1/4 of a cup, with enough pickling juice to fill in the space between the peppers. If you really don’t want to put pickled peppers in your soup, just get a green bell pepper.
Half a cup of clam juice
Juice of 1/2 lemon
Fish stock, preferably one made with the same species of fish you’re cooking with. You want enough to cover everything else you have in the pot, which is usually about a quart and a half (Fish markets usually sell them in pints, so 3 of those). You can always add some water if you come up short.
Salt and pepper
About a cup of heavy cream
Flat leaf parsley, chopped, for garnish
Two or three pounds of fish, no bones, no skin (see note below recipe)
Step one: Cut your bacon or salt pork into pieces using the rule mentioned above (nothing bigger or smaller than you’d want it to be on a spoon) but keep in mind that salt pork and bacon will both shrink a little. Toss the pork in the pot, and turn the heat to medium/low for about 5-10 minutes, cooking until some fat is rendered in the pan. Then, crank up the heat, until it’s brown and beginning to crisp. It should take less time for bacon than for salt pork. Remove the pork, putting it on a plate or a bowl with a paper towel underneath. You should leave about two or three tablespoons of fat in the bottom of the pan, so if you used bacon and there’s like a huge pool down there, spoon some out (remember, we’re also putting butter in). If you’re making it with salt pork and you want a little more fat, feel free to add a little bacon fat if you have some in the freezer.
Step two: Put the pot on medium heat and add bay leaves, thyme, onions, and celery (if you’re using green bell peppers instead of pepperoncini, add these here). Cook until everything is soft, 6-8 minutes, then add a half-cup of white wine, turn heat to high, and reduce.
Step three: Add chopped pepperoncini and let the juice sizzle for a few seconds, then add the tomatoes, potatoes, and fish stock. If the liquid isn’t covering everything, add some water. Then add the lemon juice. What you want to do at this point is get the pot boiling: really crank it up. The idea is to get the soup thick so you’re not stuck relying on heavy cream or more butter to do that later. The way to do this is to smash a bunch of potatoes on the side of the pot or the bottom to make everything thick. Smash, stir, smash, stir, etc. Nobody has ever complained that a chowder is too thick. Add salt and pepper and stir some more. At this point you are going for a specific thickness (think milkshake). When you think you’re almost there, add butter, let it melt, and stir it in.
Step four: Add the fish. The exact process here is going to depend on the type of fish you have. Some fish you’ll want to cut up to just about the exact size you want the pieces to be at the end, using the rule from above where you ask “what will this look like on a spoon?” Other fish are really delicate, and you can just kind of place the filets in the chowder and let them come apart on their own. Jasper White has a pretty good guide to different types of fish at the beginning of his cookbook 50 Chowders. Cod and haddock are both fish that you definitely don’t need to cut up. You probably want to cut up striped bass, or black sea bass.
Step four: Turn off the heat and add the cream. I know the ingredients section says one cup of cream, but it’s really more like “to taste,” and it’s not even really “to taste.” The way I add it is to color. Usually, I don’t use a half cup, although I’m also adding it straight out of the carton. I pour slowly, stir slowly and carefully (so as not to break up the fish if I’m using cod) but thoroughly enough that I don’t end up with more cream than I intended because it was hiding on the bottom. You’re waiting for the right golden amber hue to develop: a warm, vibrant orange—think sunset, golden hour, even something resembling…bright yellow cheddar cheese?—and definitely not a flat, pale orange like…a creamsicle? The picture above is what I go for. If you add too much, it will take over and dampen all of the flavors you’ve built up. If the chowder turns a color that a reasonable person might consider painting their walls, that’s way too much heavy cream. You want bright, vivid, etc.
Step five (this is the most important step): Let the soup sit for an hour or more and cool down. If you make this a day ahead of time, it will be at its best when you eat it, just put it in the fridge after it has cooled completely. At the very least, try to give it an hour. Then, when you want to eat it, heat it up very slowly on low heat. Put it in bowls and distribute the pork on top of the bowls, chop up a bunch of parsley and sprinkle that on top too. Then put oyster crackers or crushed saltines on top and grind a stupid amount of black pepper onto each bowl.
A quick note on buying fish:
Fresh fish is basically always better than frozen, but frozen fish can be fine, and it’s so much less expensive. A lot of the “fresh” fish you buy was previously frozen, too. After years working in a restaurant, I came to feel that the idea that “frozen seafood = bad” is a lesson home cooks have over-learned a little. That said, if you’re cooking with frozen fish, let it thaw completely! I am a corner cutter, and have tried to skip every annoying, time-consuming step in every meal I’ve ever made (you don’t need to simmer bacon “lardons” in water, Julia Child). Anyway, I learned the hard way that if a fish isn’t room temperature and you haven’t dried it off completely it will come out rubbery and chewy, which nobody wants.
For this chowder: cod is good, blackfish (tautog) is good, haddock is good, and striped bass1 is good. I’m sure most marine (saltwater) fish with white meat would be good (by which I mean tasty). Fresh fish that you buy at a market shouldn’t be slimy or overly stinky. A lot of cooks look at the eyes of fish, and what you want there is a kind of clear, lucid look (fish that have been sitting around too long get foggy, murky eyes). It’s also kind of fun and eerie walking around a fish market and looking all the fish dead in the eyes.
Above all: please make sure you’re buying fish that is being harvested responsibly! Go to the fish market or the grocery store, and then, while you’re there looking at the options, check out the Seafood Watch ratings for various species, which tend to be kind of delayed/reactive to bad trends but are a great place to start. The other thing to look for is certification from the Marine Stewardship Council. It can be difficult to figure out whether fish was harvested responsibly, and all you can really do is try to check and then, if you think it might not be alright, skip it. At a fish market, the best advice I can give you is that if the person selling you fish doesn’t know where it came from, don’t buy it. I’ve been buying lots of frozen haddock recently, which seems fine because it’s got a Marine Stewardship Council certification, but at the end of the day, you can never be 100% sure. Research as much as you can and then go with your gut.
Okay, that’s it for this week! Here’s the link to the winter harbor tours one more time.
If you read my stock recipe, you might be thinking “wait, Russell, you said you aren’t eating striped bass right now,” but what I actually said is that I’m not taking striped bass that I, personally, catch, out of the water and bringing them home to eat. A slightly counterintuitive dynamic has developed where it turns out that for a few species, and perhaps most dramatically for striped bass and tautog, recreational fishers are putting more pressure on the populations than the commercial fishers, who are fairly well regulated (see above note on sturgeon for some exceptions). I’ve bought striped bass on maybe one occasion, and eaten striped bass that I’ve caught on more than I can count, but I don’t really have an ethical problem with buying a striped bass that was caught legally by local commercial fishermen. As you might have guessed from reading my other letters, I believe that it’s good for people to have a relationship with the water around them, including one that involves taking some food from the sea, or making a living by extracting those resources, although I also believe strongly in making sure that that happens in a responsible way that respects the vast living machinery of ocean life. If you want to read more about fishing and fisheries management from a conservation perspective, I highly recommend Charles Witek’s blog.