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Clam Soup

A creamy soup made with clams, milk, butter, flour, and cracker crumbs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 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 ↓

Clam Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Separate the black heads from the clams.

  2. Simmer the heads in the pint of water for 30 minutes.

  3. Chop the soft part of the clams and set them aside.

Make the soup

  1. Rub the butter and flour together.

  2. Stir the mixture into the boiling clams.

  3. Add the milk, salt, and pepper.

  4. Let the mixture boil.

  5. Strain the mixture over the chopped clams.

  6. Return the mixture to the heat and boil for 3 minutes.

  7. Add the cracker crumbs 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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Clam + milktop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together636 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,z)-2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, melon).

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 flavor and the substance of the soup.
Milk
Forms the liquid base and gives the soup a creamy, smooth body.
Butter
Carries the flour and adds richness to the thickening mixture.
Flour
Thickens the soup as it heats in the liquid.
Cracker crumbs
Add body and help thicken the soup at the end.

The step that matters

Stir the butter and flour mixture into the boiling clams. Flour added without being evenly blended into fat clumps when it hits hot liquid. Rubbing it with butter first coats the starch granules so they disperse and thicken the soup smoothly.

“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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