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How to Cook Clams

Boiled clams served with melted butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 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 ↓

How to Cook Clams

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the clams

  1. Put the clams into an iron kettle and pour the water over them.

  2. Let the water boil over the clams three times.

Serve

  1. Extract the white meats from the clams.

  2. Dip the clam meats into melted butter and serve.

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).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Clams
Provide the main meat, which is steamed in the boiling water until it opens and is ready to eat.
Melted butter
Adds richness and fat to the mild clam meat for dipping.

The step that matters

Let the water boil over the clams three times. Boiling steams the clams so their shells open and the meat cooks through. Too little boiling can leave meat undercooked, which is unsafe, so the clams should be checked that they have opened.

“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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