Skip to main content
Main

Clam Soup

A thick broth made from clams, water, butter, salt, pepper, served with toasted buttered bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Butter and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Clam Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the broth

  1. Chop the clams and strain the liquor.

  2. Add the clam meat and liquor to 1 quart of water.

  3. Simmer the mixture for 1.5 hours without boiling until it resembles a thick broth.

Finish and serve

  1. Season with butter, salt, and pepper.

  2. Serve in a tureen with diced toasted buttered bread.

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. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

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

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

  3. Pepper + breadtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,964 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  4. Clam + breadtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together125 recipes

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

  5. Butter + peppertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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

What each ingredient does

Clams
Provide the main flavour and body of the soup as they release their juices and meat into the liquid.
Water
Acts as the cooking liquid that extracts flavour from the clams during the long simmer.
Butter
Adds richness and a rounded, silky mouthfeel to the finished broth.

The step that matters

Simmer without boiling. Keeping the liquid at a gentle simmer extracts flavour from the clams slowly and keeps the clam meat tender. A hard boil toughens the proteins and makes the broth cloudy and rubbery.

“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.

More clam soup recipes

Mock 5Philadelphia 3 See all 191 →

You might also like

Brown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesWhite BreadWhite Bread80 recipesBread OmeletteBread Omelette60 recipesOatmeal BreadOatmeal Bread51 recipes