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Sorr Clams with Sherry

Soft-shelled clams are cooked in butter, flour, cayenne and sherry, then spooned over toast.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Clam and butter work together. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 840 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Sorr Clams with Sherry

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Remove the plump part from the clams.

Cook

  1. In a chafing dish, melt the butter over medium heat, then add flour and cayenne pepper, stirring to combine.

  2. Add the clams and cook slightly.

  3. Pour in the sherry and cover the dish; let it simmer for 5 minutes.

Serve

  1. Place 4 clams on each slice of toast, spoon some hot sherry over them, and serve.

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.

  1. Clam + buttertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together840 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Butter + sherrytop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,505 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  4. Clam + sherrytop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together32 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-pentanedione (butter, sweet).

  5. Pepper + sherrytop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,107 recipes

    Shared aroma: piperonal (bitter, coconut).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Soft-shelled clams
Provide the main seafood body and tender texture of the dish.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, carrying flavor through the cooking liquid.
Flour
Thickens the butter and sherry into a light, cohesive sauce.
Sherry
Adds acidity and aroma, and forms the simmering liquid for the clams.

The step that matters

Simmering the clams in sherry. Simmering for the full 5 minutes under a cover keeps the sauce hot and lets the clams cook through without toughening. Overheating or boiling hard can make soft-shell clams rubbery, so keep the heat gentle once the sherry goes in.

“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.

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