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Soft Shell Clams Stewed

A stew of soft shell clams simmered with butter, flour, salt, and pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 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 ↓

Soft Shell Clams Stewed

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

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

  2. Wash the clams and place them in a pan with a little water.

Stew and serve

  1. Stew over gentle heat for 30 minutes.

  2. Add butter, then sprinkle with flour, salt, and pepper to taste.

  3. Stir the mixture, cover, and cook for an additional 10 minutes.

  4. Serve hot.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + peppertop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together50,459 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Butter + peppertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

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

  5. Clam + flourtop 23% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together576 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

Soft shell clams
Form the main body of the stew, with flesh that softens as it cooks in the liquid.
Butter
Adds richness and a rounded flavor to the broth.
Flour
Lightly thickens the cooking liquid, giving the stew more body.

The step that matters

Stew over gentle heat. Clams toughen when cooked too hard or too long. Gentle heat keeps the flesh tender and stops the stew from turning rubbery.

“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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