It’s not every day that you start a cooking class and get a science lesson about biology and precious gems.

But that’s what happened when we announced we were making New England Clam Chowder and Cheesy Cheddar Cornbread at our Week 6 class.

“I LOVE clams!” Liam Ortiz Espiritu exclaimed. “Did you know that if things get inside them they make pearls?”

That fact about clams — and oysters — got the attention of the class, as did the fact that clams live at the bottom of the sea and under the sand at beaches people go to in the summer.

All this science and biology news put everyone in the right mood to make a dish that for many was something new — and required scientific skills.

Clam Chowder is a kind of soup that is popular in coastal states from New Jersey to New England. It can be made with milk or a clear broth, but milk is the choice for the New England version.

The Week 6 recipe also used lots of vegetables for color and nutrition, and three of the four needed to be peeled. It was a good thing we discovered FOUR peelers in our pantry, because every one of them got used.

Aubrey Brown jumped in to tackle the onion, which had to go into the soup pot first to become clear and “translucent.” She soldiered through the strong smell with efficiency and only experienced a small number of tears.

Liam, Nathan Sanchez, Yohana Almonte and Yeremy Munoz took on the six fat orange carrots for the recipe and quickly had their skins curling out in strips from the peelers. They then joined Aubrey for the trickier peeling of four large, round potatoes.

 

Then everyone chopped the carrots, potatoes and four stalks of celery into one-inch cubes to go into the soup pot just as the onions turned translucent enough to see light through them.

After about 10 minutes they added a bottle of clam juice and juice from four cans of chopped clams to the mixture, brought it to a boil and then turned down the heat to let it simmer for 20 minutes.

Later the clams and two cups of milk were added to complete the chowder.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the kitchen, a different kind of mixing was taking place as Yohana and Glorielys Gonzalez teamed up to make the Cheddar Cornbread. This was the first time the class got to bake something, and the chefs had to learn that baking is different than other kinds of cooking. While there is “wiggle room” mixing and preparing meats and vegetables, baking requires that every ingredient be measured precisely.

That is because baking is a scientific process which depends on how specific amounts of different ingredients react with each other.

If the measurements are off even a little, the reaction may not work and the outcome will not be what it is supposed to be.

With Ms. Linda looking on, Yohana and Glorielys approached the task like a scientific experiment.

“We took turns mixing and measuring and cracking eggs and all that,” Yohana explained.

First they combined exactly one cup of cornmeal, 3/4 of a cup of flour, two tablespoons of sugar, a teaspoon of salt and two teaspoons of baking powder in a mixing bowl.

Then they cracked two eggs into another bowl, added one cup of milk, almost 1/4 cup of melted butter and mixed them with a whisk.

After that, they formed a hollow “well” in the dry ingredients, poured in the liquid and whisked it all together to create the batter.

For fun, they poured the batter into a muffin tin to make individual cornbread muffins instead of one loaf, and topped them with cheddar cheese.

When the chowder was warmed through, and the cornbread came out of the oven, we moved to the table.

Mr. Peter, who grew up eating clam chowder in the New England state of Maine, served up bowls of chowder, and everyone got one and a half muffins.

Liam took one taste of the chowder and announced to everybody “It’s wonderful … it’s divine!”

Aubrey said “I really liked the potatoes. They were really soft and good. But I didn’t expect clams to taste like that. They tasted like chicken. It was really good, though. I liked the soup. It was one of my favorites so far!”

Yohana liked the chowder so much she took two large containers home “for my mom, my dad and my cousins.”

And the Cheddar Cornbread?

EVERYONE loved the cornbread, and the class probably would have eaten twice as much if we had made it.

“The muffins were delicious,” Yeremy said. “I ate like 12 of them. The muffins were the best thing about class today.”

Yohana agreed, enthusing that the muffins tasted “sparkly in my mouth.”

“I had cheese and plain and both of them were SOOO good, she said.

Yeremy used just one word to describe the class.

Asked what he liked best, he declared:

“Everything!”