This Chowder Is A Keeper

Best clam chowder: Duke's Yacht

Club, 1111 Fairview Ave. N., Seattle.

292-9402. (Also at other Duke's

locations.)

For kids, white food is suspect stuff - especially if it has steam rising from it. For them it is most likely some foul substance such as canned cream of mushroom soup or one of its coagulated cousins. Or clam chowder.

It remains a mystery how white food rises to a higher classification and status at some point in the maturation process.

The answer may be hormonal - as with the adult drives to bathe, play golf, accumulate debt and seek management positions. More likely, however, it is linguistic. Among grown-ups, white foods have a tendency to assume French names - such as hollandaise sauce and vichyssoise.

With chowder, the Frenchness is subliminal but no less compelling. The name derives from chaudiere, the French word for cauldron: The cream-heavy concoction probably was introduced by Breton sailors who visited Canada's Atlantic provinces and New England in the 1600s.

Most adults are likely to classify clam chowder among their ``comfort foods,'' along with a few other French whites such as sauvignon blanc.

When I was a child, I ate as a child. Now I have put childish tastes behind me.

In Seattle, I've found true comfort in only one chowder: Duke's.

Believe me, I tried to discover some little cafe, some secret place that each Friday serves up something better than the region's foremost soup du jour, the reputed paragon of soupe epaisse de palourdes (that is, clam chowder).

Mais non. I surveyed about 20 places and did find a few other chowders worth hunkering down with - most notably at the Lakeside Restaurant (2501 N. Northlake Way), Daniel's Broiler (Leschi, 200 Lake Washington Blvd., and Bellevue, 10500 N.E. Eighth Ave.), Latitude 47 (1232 Westlake Ave. N.), Apres Vous Cafe (1530 Queen Anne Ave. N.), and the Fifth Avenue Bar & Grill (1326 Fifth Ave.).

But for chowder aficionados, even the second best can seem pis-aller, no substitute.

Of course, clam-chowder evaluations are highly subjective. The

closer a version is to the one you wouldn't eat as a child, the greater the likelihood that you'll love it as an adult.

(In my case, that's not exactly true. My father had a fondness for Manhattan-style chowder, which my mother served occasionally as a Friday penance. It's based on the mistaken idea that tomatoes and clams have complementary flavors. Some food historians say we can blame it on Rhode Island cooks in the 18th century; others say it originated in Coney Island stands in the late 19th century. The name, says John Mariani in his ``Dictionary of American Food & Drink,'' no doubt stems from pub

lic wisdom: Only New Yorkers could be deranged enough to add tomatoes to clam chowder. To this day, I have a tendency to gag on it.)

New England transplants aren't likely to favor Northwest-style chowders.

Traditional New England versions are thinner, made with milk or condensed milk instead of heavy cream; any thickening is accomplished with crackers or with starch from heavier doses of potatoes. New Englanders also tend to use salt pork or fatback, which affects texture more than flavor, instead of meatier bacon preferred here. And it's never herbed.

A New England restaurant entered Seattle's annual chowder cookoff a couple of years ago with a highly regarded traditional recipe. It came in dead last. Duke's probably would fare no better back East. But the Northwestern style probably is closer to that cooked up by those sailors 300 years ago.

Jack Jones, Duke Moscrip's executive chef, developed the region's dynastic recipe over the course of seven years, with colleagues such as Ron Steckler, chef at Duke's Yacht Club on Fairview. Its progenitor, Moscrip has said, was a traditional family version that used to be served up on Fridays only at Duke's Bellevue.

The potion (at $4.95 a bowl) is distinguished from other local chowders by several factors. Most significant, it uses fresh clams whenever possible, while virtually all other restaurants use exclusively frozen clams, or at best chopped geoduck, along with commercially prepared clam concentrates and bases. Supplies of fresh local clams are uneven, even in season.

Duke's chowder is labor-intensive and expensive. ``Using fresh clams, we can make our own nectar and cook down our own bases,'' Jones says. ``They have to be the right clams (a half- to three-quarters of an inch across, according to Steckler, and not gaping when they come in, as if they've been purging themselves in fresh water too long).

``Sometimes there may even be a little sand in the chowder, but we, and most of our customers, think that's a fair tradeoff for freshness.''

Whatever Duke's chefs can get fresh from beds in Canada or Washington is supplemented by frozen Manila clams farmed in Holland, Steckler says.

The cream is exceptionally high in butterfat (48 percent). The herbs - marjoram, basil, dill, thyme - are mostly fresh and either local or from Hawaii. Proportions are adjusted seasonally, depending on quality (less is used, for instance, when the herbs come in more heavily flowered and have a more intense flavor).

Although Jones makes regular rounds to all of Duke's five area restaurants (Queen Anne, 236 First Ave. W; Lake Union chowder

house, 901 Fairview Ave. N.; Yacht Club, 1111 Fairview Ave. N.; Bellevue, 10116 N.E. Eighth Ave.; and Green Lake, 7850 Green Lake Drive N.) to enforce a certain consistency to the chowders that each chef prepares daily, there's some room for creativity and idiosyncrasy. Diners are most likely to find the most herby potions at Bellevue and at the Yacht Club, for example.

``And just because we take full advantage of what we can get fresh,'' Jones says, ``there's going to be some variation even at a single restaurant. The goal is quality above consistence. What we want most is for Duke's chowder to be consistently the best.''

Duke's chowder recipe is distributed freely at each of the restaurants, but don't expect even the most scrupulous attention to its ingredients and proportions to yield the same flavor. ``Part of the secret is in cooking in huge batches,'' Steckler says. ``That's just the way it is.''

Jones admits (rather sheepishly) that he's considering adding a Manhattan-style chowder to Duke's menus. ``It may take years,'' he says, ``and who knows how many people will really go for it. But if we do come up with one, you can bet it'll be the best Manhattan chowder you can find anywhere.''

JIM MOLNAR IS A WRITER AND EDITOR WITH THE TIMES' TRAVEL DEPARTMENT. HIS COLUMN, THE THOUGHTFUL TRAVELER, APPEARS IN THE TRAVEL SECTION ON THE SECOND SUNDAY OF EACH MONTH.