This Spicy Clam Chowder Is St. Augustine’s Best-Kept Secret ...Middle East

ELKTON, Fla. — Couples huddled under umbrellas; anoraks poorly shielded fairgoers’ faces. But lining up an hour before the St. Ambrose Spring Fair officially started on this last Sunday in March was the only way to guarantee a piping-hot cup of Mary Ellen Masters’ Minorcan clam chowder. Rain be damned.

The life of Masters’ peppery chowder began four days earlier at St. Ambrose Catholic Church, where volunteers rendered salt pork and sautéed 18 cases of onions. Masters, in a “Proud to Be a Minorcan” apron and rhinestone glasses, supervised the scene. Nearby, two food processors blitzed celery stalks and bell peppers.

“Mary Ellen says no chunks allowed,” said Sarah Pierce, a volunteer, as she culled irregular bits.

Plenty of local restaurants serve Minorcan clam chowder year-round, but there’s only one Queen of Minorcan Clam Chowder, as Masters is locally known. “Hers is thicker and has more meat and potatoes,” said Keith Walker, who carried a cooler to fill with his yearly haul, adding, “Some of the other ones in town are like water.”

Every year since 1883, locals and visitors alike have gathered at St. Ambrose, founded in 1875 by Elkton’s Minorcan community. Early on, they enjoyed specialties including pilau (pronounced per-low), a versatile dish of rice and meat, and gopher tortoise stew, a Minorcan staple until the mid-1970s when Florida lawmakers limited and then banned its wild harvest.

When the gopher stew disappeared, so did the crowds — until sometime in the 1980s, when Masters pitched her mother’s recipe for clam chowder, made with the same tomato base and seasonings. “I made one 15-gallon pot, and it sold out,” she said. Her cooking crew of about 40 now produces 185 gallons of chowder every year, sold from a wooden outbuilding christened the Chowder Chapel.

“Minorcans are to St. Augustine what Cajuns are to Louisiana,” said Darien Andreu, a professor and director of the Minorcan Studies Project at Flagler College. “Both came from far away. They spoke a foreign language. They brought with them culture, traditions and cuisine, and they stayed on to become a cornerstone population.”

In the late 18th century, Scottish physician Andrew Turnbull recruited indentured laborers from across the Mediterranean and assembled them on Minorca, a Spanish island, then part of the British Empire. These Greek, Italian and Corsican workers intermarried with the local population before setting off for Turnbull’s plantation in New Smyrna, on Florida’s Atlantic Coast. (Collectively, this group came to identify as Minorcans.)

Masters has lived in the St. Augustine area her entire life and grew up a short walk from the 150-year-old church. She is a descendant of the Minorcans who sought amnesty in St. Augustine after nine years laboring on the plantation, walking 70 miles to freedom in what’s now St. Johns County, home to an estimated 30,000 Minorcans.

Today, however, newcomers outnumber Minorcans at St. Ambrose. The day before the fair, a dozen paddle-wielding stirrers — many of them transplants hailing from Miami, Rhode Island, Boston and Pittsburgh — tended to pots for nearly seven hours. “We’re stirring our way to heaven,” said Pat Rogera, a volunteer.

Once the chowder base simmered to cohesion, Masters and her right-hand man, Carmine Quatrano, a New Jersey native and church member for more than a decade, added fresh clams and handfuls of dried spices — Italian seasoning, thyme, marjoram, bay leaves and black pepper. The morning of the fair, Masters retasted each batch: “If my name is on it, I want it to be the best I can make it.”

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She dialed in the herbs in each pot before spooning in the signature ingredient: datil peppers, a cousin of the habanero with a serious Scoville rating. “Datil peppers are synonymous with the word Minorcan,” Andreu said.

Historians believe it arrived in Florida by way of Cuba, and, isolated in St. Johns County, the pepper evolved to have a distinctly sweet, fruity flavor. Masters’ chowder comes in mild, medium and spicy, and even the tamest pots sing with datil character.

A first-time fairgoer from Staten Island bought a 12-ounce cup for lunch and returned for a take-home quart. Three sisters bought enough chowder to stock their freezers. Masters’ daughter, Mary Lou Brown, took orders and managed the till. Her son, Lawrence, Masters’ chowder heir apparent, and grandson Morgan had hauled pots and executed the matriarch’s orders for days. Family members passed around the newest Masters, 4-month-old Haisley, a seventh-generation Minorcan, in denim overalls and a white bow.

At 4:01 p.m., Mary Tennenberg, a family friend, ladled the last quart. Chowder streaked her toes. It had baptized one volunteer’s bare legs and stained shirtsleeves. A parishioner brought Masters a box of pinot grigio, and she finally sat down. The Chowder Chapel was closed until next year.

Recipe: Minorcan Clam Chowder

Although it shares similarities with mild-mannered Manhattan clam chowder, thick, briny, spicy Minorcan clam chowder gets its signature, fruity heat from datil peppers, and its Bolognese-like texture from a vegetable purée, plus a generous simmering time. Minorcans descend from indentured servants who, in the late 18th century, were recruited from around the Mediterranean, assembled on the Spanish island of Minorca and sent to Florida to farm indigo. Many Minorcan families still live near St. Augustine, Florida, and visitors to the Spanish-settled city can eat the chowder in a number of restaurants. However, the pinnacle of Minorcan clam chowder cooking is achieved just once a year at the St. Ambrose Spring Fair, for which Mary Ellen Masters — who is known as the “Queen of Minorcan Clam Chowder” — oversees the annual effort to prepare 180 concentrated, clammy gallons.

Recipe from Mary Ellen Masters

Adapted by Caroline Hatchett

Yield: 9 cups

Total time: 1 hour

Ingredients:

Preparation:

1. Bring a medium saucepan of water to a boil. Add the potatoes to the boiling water and cook until almost cooked through (a thin knife should easily pierce the potato without going all the way to the center), about 7 minutes. Drain and set aside.

2. Meanwhile, in a food processor, pulse the onion, celery and bell pepper until nearly puréed.

3. In a large, heavy-bottomed pot, cook the salt pork over medium, stirring occasionally, until some of the fat is rendered and the pork is browned, 6 to 8 minutes.

4. Add processed vegetables to the salt pork and cook, stirring frequently, until most of their liquid has evaporated, about 3 minutes. Add tomato purée and crushed tomatoes and continue cooking, stirring frequently to prevent sticking, until liquid has almost all cooked away and the mixture is thick and chunky, about 10 minutes.

5. Add the cooked potatoes as well as the bay leaves, Italian seasoning, marjoram, thyme and black pepper, and stir to combine. Add the clam juice and cook over medium-low at a soft simmer for 30 minutes more, stirring occasionally.

6. Add datil peppers and simmer over low heat until flavors blend, about 10 minutes, stirring in clams in the last few minutes of cooking to warm through. Taste and add salt if needed.

Tip

Essential to Minorcan cooking, datil peppers are cousins to habanero chiles and have a similar Scoville rating, but their flavor is sweeter and fruitier. The peppers ripen in June near St. Augustine, Florida, and you can purchase them seasonally from Mayhem Datil Pepper Farms.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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