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Clam Pot-pie

A savory pie made with clams, water, butter, pepper, sea salt, and biscuit dough.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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 ↓

Clam Pot-pie

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the clams

  1. Wash and clean the clams.

  2. Boil the clams in 1 quart of water until the shells open.

Make the broth

  1. Remove the clams and add 3 quarts of water to the clam juice.

  2. Season the mixture with butter, pepper, and coarse sea salt.

  3. Bring to a boil, then add the clams and biscuit dough.

  4. Cover tightly and boil for 1 hour.

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. Pepper + biscuittop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together841 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  3. Clam + biscuittop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together48 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  4. Butter + biscuittop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,009 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  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 flavor and the meat that makes up the pot pie filling.
Dough for raised biscuit
Cooks in the broth to form soft, dumpling-like pieces that absorb the liquid.
Butter
Adds richness and a rounded, savory fat flavor to the broth.

The step that matters

Cover tightly and boil for 1 hour. Boiling the biscuit dough under a tight lid keeps steam and moisture in, so the dough cooks through and turns tender. Too much evaporation leaves the broth reduced and the dough dry or tough.

“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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