Name: Burnham’s Clam Bouillon
Ingredients: 1 cup clam bouillon; fresh milk or butter (optional); seasoning to taste

Why it works: Clam and milk work together. They rank in the top 19% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 636 recipes. Both carry (e,z)-2,6-nonadienal, which smells cucumber, melon. The science ↓

Burnham’s Clam Bouillon

Ingredients

1 cup clam bouillon
fresh milk or butter (optional)
seasoning to taste

Directions

Heat the clam bouillon until hot.
Serve the clam bouillon iced, as preferred.
Dilute to suit your taste.
Add a little fresh milk or butter for better flavor, if desired.
Serve in a cup and season to taste.
Enjoy as a substitute for tea, coffee, or cocoa at breakfast.

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 + milktop 19% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together636 recipes

Shared aroma: (e,z)-2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, melon).

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

What each ingredient does

Clam bouillon: Provides the main clam flavor and liquid base of the drink.
Fresh milk or butter: Adds richness and a rounder, softer flavor to the bouillon.

“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.