Melville’s Chowder

In Chapter XV of Moby-Dick, Ishmael and Queequeg arrive on Nantucket Island, tired and in need of dinner. They make their way to the Try Pots restaurant, where the proprietor’s wife, Mrs. Hussey, seats them at a table still dirty with the remnants of the previous diners’ meal. She then asks them but a single question: “Clam or Cod?”

Ishmael is perplexed. What sort of a restaurant, he wonders, would offer, as one of its options, a single bivalve for supper, and on a cold December night at that? He asks for clarification, but Mrs. Hussey, hearing just the word in Ishmael’s query, hustles off to the kitchen and calls out the order: “clam for two.”