Name: Little Neck Clams
Ingredients: 6 little neck clams per serving; crushed ice; 1/4 lemon per serving

Why it works: Clam and lemon work together. They rank in the top 23% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 152 recipes. Both carry alpha-pinene, which smells pine, turpentine. The science ↓

Little Neck Clams

Ingredients

6 little neck clams per serving
crushed ice
1/4 lemon per serving

Directions

Serve clams on the deep halves of the shells.
Arrange on plates of crushed ice.
Place one-fourth of a lemon in the center of each plate.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

Clam + lemontop 23% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together152 recipes

Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Clams: Provide the main raw seafood, served chilled in their shells as the dish's centerpiece.
Lemon: Adds bright acidity that cuts the briny, rich flavor of raw clams.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.