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’s Minorcan clam chowder. Rain be damned.
Recipe: Minorcan Clam Chowder
The life of Mrs. Masters’s peppery chowder began four days earlier at St. Ambrose Catholic Church, where volunteers rendered salt pork and sautéed 18 cases of onions. Mrs. 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 Mrs. 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 like 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 Mrs. 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, the 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 Mr. Turnbull’s plantation in New Smyrna, on Florida’s Atlantic Coast. (Collectively, this group came to identify as Minorcans.)
Mrs. 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, Mrs. 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, Mrs. Masters re-tasted each batch: “If my name is on it, I want it to be the best I can make it.”
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,” Dr. 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. Mrs. Masters’s 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. Mrs. Masters’s daughter, Mary Lou Brown, took orders and managed the till. Her son, Laurence, Mrs. Masters’s 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 Mrs. Masters a box of pinot grigio, and she finally sat down. The Chowder Chapel was closed until next year.
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