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Steamed Soft Clams

Steamed soft clams served with hot butter and Boston brown bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Steamed Soft Clams

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash the clams thoroughly to remove sand and grit.

  2. Prepare a hot butter dish with melted butter.

Steam the clams

  1. In a chafing dish, melt the butter and add the clams, shells included.

  2. Cover the dish and cook for at least 15 minutes in their own juice.

Serve

  1. Remove the shells and black skin from the clams.

  2. Dip each clam body into the hot butter and serve immediately with Boston brown bread.

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. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

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

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

  3. Clam + breadtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together125 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
Provide the main protein, and their own juice becomes the steaming liquid.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, and carries flavor when used for melting and dipping.

The step that matters

Washing the clams thoroughly. Sand and grit trapped inside the shells will not cook out and can ruin the texture and flavor of the dish, so the clams must be cleaned before steaming.

“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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