Name: Clam Bouillon
Ingredients: 4 quarts clams; Salt to taste; 2½ cups cold water; Pepper to taste

Why it works: Clam and pepper work together. They rank in the top 25% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 952 recipes. Both carry alpha-pinene, which smells pine, turpentine. The science ↓

Clam Bouillon

Ingredients

4 quarts clams
Salt to taste
2½ cups cold water
Pepper to taste

Directions

Prepare the clams

Buy clams in shells and wash them thoroughly using a brush, changing the water several times.

Steam

Place the clams in a kettle, add cold water, cover tightly, and bring to a boil.
Steam the clams until the shells open.

Strain and serve

Strain the liquid through cheesecloth, season with salt and pepper, and serve in bouillon cups.

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.

Clam + peppertop 25% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together952 recipes

Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

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

What each ingredient does

Clams: Release their natural liquor as they steam, forming the broth's main flavor.
Cold water: Adds liquid for steaming and helps extract flavor from the clams.

“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.