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Fried Clams

Fried clams seasoned with cayenne pepper and sea salt, cooked in butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Clam and butter work together. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 840 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Fried Clams

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash the clams and place them in a vessel without water.

  2. Cover the vessel and wait for the clams to open.

  3. Remove the clams from their shells and dry them with a napkin.

Fry and season

  1. Season the clams with cayenne pepper and salt if needed.

  2. Fry the clams in butter until golden brown.

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

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

  2. Pepper + buttertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  3. 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
Provide the main body of the dish, cooking into tender meat that takes on a crisp, browned exterior.
Butter
Conducts heat for frying and adds richness, helping the clams brown to a golden colour.
Cayenne pepper
Adds a sharp, warm heat that contrasts with the sweetness of the clams.

The step that matters

Drying the clams before frying. Surface moisture cools the butter and turns the frying into steaming, so the clams brown poorly. Patting them dry with a napkin lets the butter sear the surface to a golden crust.

“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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