Chowder and caldera are siblings — both from Latin "hot pot" — and Maine once considered outlawing tomatoes in chowder as a culinary crime.
A thick, rich soup or stew, typically made with seafood or corn, and often containing milk or cream, potatoes, and onions.
From French chaudière (cauldron, cooking pot), from Late Latin caldaria (pot for hot things), from Latin calidus (hot, warm). The dish was named after the pot it was cooked in — fishermen in Brittany and Newfoundland made communal stews in a shared chaudière Key roots: caldaria (Late Latin: "cooking pot for hot things"), calidus (Latin: "hot, warm"), *kelh₁- (Proto-Indo-European: "warm, hot").
Chowder is a cousin of caldera — both from Latin calidus (hot), through the cooking pot caldaria. Breton and Norman fishermen working the Grand Banks of Newfoundland would pool their catch into a communal chaudière (cauldron), creating a thick soup that became a New England institution. The "chowder wars" between New England (cream-based) and Manhattan (tomato-based) are