Egg Chowder

Egg Chowder is a monument to the inventiveness of the farm wife. Imagine being on a farm in Maine in the dead of winter. There are no more vegetables except the root veggies. All you have is potatoes. There's no fish, either because you live too far from the coast to buy it, or because the boats are frozen in by the ice. So what can you put in your basic potato, onion, milk chowder to make it a little different, to give it a little spark? Eggs! Egg chowder is the chowder base (milk, potatoes, onions) with eggs carefully broken into it and allowed to poach. It's cheap, easy and tasty. What more can you want from a soup? There are several (6,000,000 if you believe Google,) variations on this on the Internet. One, at http://www.the-coop.org/, involves making sort of a casserole and using dark rum as a flavoring agent. Several use hardboiled eggs. I had no idea until I started snooping through the book for unmade recipes, that there even was such a thing as Egg Chowder. Egg Chowder 3/4 cup diced salt pork 1 onion thinly sliced 3 potatoes, sliced 4 cups milk, scalded freshly ground black pepper to taste 4 eggs pilot crackers 1. Cook the salt pork until it releases some of the fat, but do not allow to become crisp. 2. Add the onion and potatoes and cook, stirring occasionally, ten minutes. Add the milk and pepper and cook gently until potatoes are tender.3. Break eggs into simmering mixture and cook three minutes. Serve with crackers. Makes 4 servings.