Have you ever wondered why Hatteras Style Chowder isn’t creamy?

When the now-famous recipe was first created, the Outer Banks was relatively bovine-free. In fact, milk is a fairly modern resource for the Outer Banks.

As far back as 1903, the Wright Brothers complained of lack of milk here. In his writing, Orville griped, “I have just stopped a minute to eat a spoonful of condensed milk. No one down here has any regular milk. The poor cows have such a hard time scraping up a living that they don’t have any time for making milk,” he wrote.

And he was correct. Without refrigeration, beef was hard to keep, so locals rarely bothered to raise them for meat. Dairy cows were hard to feed on our meager native grasses. Then in 1933, two hurricanes killed much of the livestock here. Next, grazing on the dunes was federally outlawed, and the remaining cows were removed.

Even as late a 1945 in what’s now downtown Manteo, only a modest herd of six cows grazed at the present elementary school. Certainly not enough milk to inspire a cream-based stew of any kind.

“It was just an ‘old school’ chowder, one like everybody else has always made down here,” said Dolly Gray Jones, who’s recipe goes back generations. “Everybody had onions and potatoes in dry storage. Everybody had salt meat, the pork. And anybody could get out and get the clams,” she says.

So now you know the history of why we don’t do creamy chowders. In fact, now we Bankers prefer it that way. Or at least, some of us do.