Chowder is a thick soup prepared with milk or cream, a roux, and seafood or vegetables. Oyster crackers or saltines may accompany chowders as a side item, and cracker pieces may be dropped atop the dish. New England clam chowder is typically made with chopped clams and diced potatoes, in a mixed cream and milk base, often with a small amount of butter. Other common chowders include seafood chowder, which includes fish, clams, and many other types of shellfish; lamb or veal chowder made with barley; corn chowder, which uses corn instead of clams; a wide variety of fish chowders; and potato chowder, which is often made with cheese. Fish, corn, and clam chowders are popular in North America, especially New England and Atlantic Canada. Etymology The origin of the term chowder is obscure. One possible source is the French word chaudron, the French word for cauldron, the type of cooking or heating stove on which the first chowders were probably cooked. Chodier was also a name for a cooking pot in the Creole language of the French Caribbean islands. Note also the Portuguese, Brazilian, Galician and Basque fish and shellfish stew known as caldeirada which would appear to have a similar etymology. Another possible source of the word "chowder" could be the French dish called chaudrée (sometimes spelled chauderée), which is a type of thick fish soup from the coastal regions of Charente-Maritime and Vendée. Yet another etymology could be from Quebecois French, where chaudière means "bucket". Although in the sixteenth century in Cornwall and Devon a dialect word "jowter" was used to describe hawkers, particularly fish-sellers, with later variants "chowder" and "chowter", this is not cited by the Oxford English Dictionary as a possible source due to controversy regarding the origins of the dish itself. Though the earliest citation the OED gives for the word used in its current sense of a fish-based stew is American, the journal kept by the young botanist Joseph Banks visiting the English and French Labrador fisheries in 1766 gives an account of chowder, "which I believe is Peculiar to this Country", and its preparation that shows it was unfamiliar, though "when well made a Luxury that the rich Even in England at Least in my opinion might be fond of It is a Soup made with a small Quantity of salt Pork cut into Small Slices a good deal of fish and