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Clam Cakes

A fried batter of clams, eggs, flour, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Egg and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 106,462 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Clam Cakes

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the clams

  1. Remove the gills from the clams if using hard clams.

Make the batter

  1. In a bowl, mix the eggs with enough flour to create a stiff batter.

  2. Add salt and the chopped clams to the batter.

Fry and serve

  1. Drop spoonfuls of the mixture into hot oil and fry like pancakes.

  2. Serve immediately while very hot.

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. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Clam + flourtop 23% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together576 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Clam + eggtop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together337 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

Egg and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 106,462 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 bulk, giving each cake its seafood taste and chewy bite.
Eggs
Bind the batter together and help the cakes hold their shape when fried.
Flour
Thickens the eggs into a stiff batter that gives the cakes body and structure.

The step that matters

Drop spoonfuls into hot oil. Oil that is not hot enough lets the batter soak up grease and fry unevenly, while proper heat quickly sets the outside so the cakes hold their shape and brown.

“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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