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Clam Soup

A soup made with clams, milk, water, butter, curry, and optional rice flour.

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 ↓

Clam Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the broth

  1. Drain the liquor from the clams and place it in a pot over medium heat.

  2. Add salt to taste and let it boil for 10 minutes.

Cook the clams and finish

  1. Add the clams and boil for 30 minutes, keeping the pot covered.

  2. In another vessel, scald the milk without boiling it.

  3. After 30 minutes, add the scalded milk to the pot and boil again, stirring to prevent burning.

  4. If you want a thicker soup, stir in the rice flour with the hot milk.

  5. Add the butter and serve immediately.

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. Milk + ricetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,374 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  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

Clams
Provide the main flavour and body of the soup as they cook in the clam liquor.
Milk
Adds creaminess and mild sweetness, rounding out the savoury clam broth.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth fat finish to the soup.
Rice flour
Thickens the soup slightly when stirred into the hot milk.

The step that matters

Boiling the milk after adding it. Milk scorches and can curdle on hot metal, so the soup must be stirred constantly when the scalded milk goes in and boils again.

“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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