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Clam Stew

Clam stew made by simmering clams in a butter‑flour sauce and serving over toast.

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 Stew

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the clams

  1. Place the clams on a grill over hot coals.

  2. Remove the clams from their shells as soon as they open, saving the juice.

Make the stew and serve

  1. Add hot water, pepper, salt, and butter rolled in flour to the clam juice.

  2. Cook for five minutes.

  3. Pour the clam mixture over toast.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Pepper + flourtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together50,459 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Pepper + buttertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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 body and briny flavor of the stew.
Butter rolled in flour
Flour thickens the hot liquid into a light, smooth stew body.

The step that matters

Add the butter rolled in flour to the hot clam juice. Flour clumps if dropped into liquid without being coated in fat first. Rolling it in butter and adding it to hot liquid lets the flour disperse and thicken the stew smoothly instead of forming lumps.

“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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