THE FIRST WORD ANYONE EVER SPOKE to me in London was blimey. Age 18, I came out of the Earl’s Court tube station from Heathrow and asked a woman where the youth hostel was. “Blimey!” she replied, unironically. “Aw daon’t knaow.” I would later spend a couple of years living in London, but have never, ever (outside of Masterpiece Theatre) heard the word again. Of course not. It’s been dead for decades. That’s why I’ve never told this story to any of my English friends. They wouldn’t believe me, any more than I’d believe them if they claimed an American had greeted them with “Howdy, pardner.” I went home to Massachusetts last week, and was thrown into the New England equivalent of this too-stereotypical-to-be-credible situation. Briefly, I wound up in an argument over . . . clam chowder. The argument occurred in a used-book store. The owner was discussing restaurants with one of her customers, and they got on to whether Maddie’s or Staley’s had the best chowder in town. A ridiculous question, along the lines of “Who has a better fastball—Pedro Martinez or Elton John?” Maddie’s makes a piping-hot, brothy concoction, salted by the sea, with a great pile of meaty clams and cubed potatoes rearing up over the buttery striations on the surface. Inebriating odors of brine billow nosewards. It’s not just the best chowder in town, it’s the best chowder in the world. Really, the proper comparison here is not to other chowders but to, say, the Matterhorn, Sophia Loren, and the Divine Comedy. Staley’s, by contrast . . . I should note here that Staley’s, as some readers may have guessed, is a made-up name. I went to high school with the owner of the actual place and don’t want to turn this into anything personal. So let’s just say that anyone who remembers papier-mâché from junior high school will have an idea of Staley’s chowder: pulpy, clamless, insipid. If there were a product called Clam Paste, which looked and tasted like Miracle Whip with a bit of belly-button lint stirred in, would you eat it at just above room temperature? No? Then you, like me, will be baffled by the continuing popularity of Staley’s chowder in certain circles. So when the nice old lady standing in front of the Barbara Pym novels said she thought Staley’s was better because it was “unbelievably thick,” I nearly wrestled her to the ground. To say chowder is good because it’s thick is like saying a woman is beautiful because she wears baggy clothes. Thickness in chowder is obtained by adding flour, which obstructs the clam flavor. And that, I fear, is the whole point of it. Thick chowder follows the Iron Law of Restaurant Food, which states that, over time, every entrée converges with pure ketchup. Thick chowder is for people who don’t like chowder but, for some reason, want to say they do. So I glared at Ms. Pym and told her as much. I told her Staley’s serves the kind of chowder you get in small-town Midwestern airports when all the flights have left and the only place serving food is the bar. I believe I mentioned that chowder is a soup, not a condiment. Anyone who overheard this exchange would have said, How quaint. They sure take their chowder seriously around here! But, of course, we don’t, and there was nothing quaint about it. The argument I had with Ms. Pym would only be possible at a time when no one gives a fig what his chowder tastes like. There’s no question that I was the traditionalist and she the progressive. Maddie’s makes its excellent chowder the way it’s always been made in New England. (I’m sure of that—it’s a lot like my grandmother’s.) And Staley’s most likely copied its recipe for “Traditional New Englande Clamme Chowder” from some crappy national chain (“Obsessions: A Place For Seafood” or “Scandals: A Fish Joint”), whose recipe was in turn prompted by a focus group of tasters hired in Albuquerque. In a word: Blimey. This is a battle that the Staleys of the world, by definition, always win. Maddie’s chowder may be authentic, but Staley’s, it pains me to say, is typical. My attachment to Maddie’s is as strong as it is precisely because real chowder is now so hard to find. This is an example of why it’s generally imbecilic to moan about someone or something’s being “stifled by the forces of tradition.” The forces of tradition can’t stifle anything. They can’t stifle a yawn.
