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Clam Soup

A soup made with clams, milk, butter, flour, cayenne pepper, and served with crackers.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Clam Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the clams

  1. Drain the juice from the clams and heat it until scalding.

  2. If using soft-shell clams, wash them in their liquor with cold water and strain through cheesecloth.

  3. Chop the clams finely and add them to the boiling juice.

  4. Boil quickly once and then remove from heat.

Make the milk base

  1. In another saucepan, heat the milk until boiling.

  2. Add the butter blended with flour and cayenne pepper to the boiling milk.

  3. Boil for a moment and keep hot.

Combine and serve

  1. When ready to serve, pour the clams into the milk. Stir.

  2. Serve immediately in hot soup plates with crackers.

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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  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. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Clam + milktop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together636 recipes

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

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 flavor and texture of the soup as chopped pieces in the broth.
Rich milk
Forms the creamy body of the soup.
Butter
Adds richness and fat that carries flavor and smooths the soup.
Flour
Blended with the butter to lightly thicken the milk.

The step that matters

Boil the milk base before adding the clams. Flour needs to be boiled briefly in the milk to cook out its raw taste and to thicken the base properly. Keeping the milk hot, not boiling hard, afterward helps prevent scorching and curdling.

“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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