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Bisque of Clams

A creamy soup made with hard and soft clams, milk, cream, butter, flour, and sea salt.

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 ↓

Bisque of Clams

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Cook the hard and soft clams in their own liquor until they boil.

  2. Heat the milk in a separate kettle until it boils.

  3. Mix the cream, butter, and flour in a bowl until smooth, then stir the mixture into the boiling milk to thicken.

  4. Remove the clams and thickened milk from heat and combine them.

  5. Season with coarse sea salt to taste.

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. Cream + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Clam + buttertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together840 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

Hard clams
Provide the main clam flavor and body once cooked in their own liquor.
Milk
Forms the creamy base of the bisque that the thickener sets into.
Flour
Thickens the milk as it heats, giving the bisque a smooth, body-rich texture.
Cream
Adds richness and a smoother mouthfeel to the finished bisque.
Butter
Adds fat that carries flavor and helps make the flour-thickened mixture smooth.

The step that matters

Stirring the flour mixture into boiling milk. Flour thickens only when its starch is heated in liquid, and adding it to boiling milk without first making it smooth can cause lumps. Whisking it in well keeps the bisque silky.

“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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