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Baked Clam Pie

A pie filled with clams, broth, onion, butter, nutmeg, and flour, baked in a crust.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Nutmeg and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 18,623 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Baked Clam Pie

Ingredients

Directions

Make the filling

  1. Boil the veal or chicken broth with the chopped onion in a pot.

  2. Add the halved clams and season with butter and nutmeg.

  3. Thicken the mixture with flour as you would for any pie filling.

Assemble and bake

  1. Prepare a pie crust.

  2. Fill the crust with the clam mixture.

  3. Cover with another crust.

  4. Bake.

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. Nutmeg + flourtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Onion + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together42,912 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Butter + nutmegtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together24,377 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

Clams
Provide the main savory filling and flavor of the pie.
Flour
Thickens the broth into a filling that holds together when sliced.
Veal or chicken broth
Supplies the liquid base that cooks the onion and carries the flavor of the filling.
Butter
Adds richness and fat that softens the flavor of the filling.

The step that matters

Thicken the mixture with flour. Flour must be cooked into the hot liquid to swell and set the starch; if it is under-thickened the filling will run out of the baked pie.

Swap the nutmeg

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (clam, veal, onion, butter, flour):

  1. Garlicfits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Capersfits better
  4. Nutmegthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against clam, veal, onion, butter, flour. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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