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Clams a LA Tobasco

A clam dish flavored with butter, flour, lemon, Tabasco sauce, and egg yolks, served on toasted crackers.

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

Clams a LA Tobasco

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the clams

  1. Remove the soft part from the clams, wash them thoroughly, and chop the remaining parts finely.

  2. Simmer the clams in their liquor and enough water to cover for 15 minutes.

Make the sauce

  1. In a separate bowl, cream together the butter and flour.

  2. Add the lemon juice, Tabasco sauce, and salt to the mixture.

  3. Beat the egg yolks and heat them with the other mixture.

Serve

  1. Serve immediately on toasted crackers.

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. Butter + saucetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together15,338 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  4. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

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 body and briny seafood flavor of the dish.
Butter
Adds richness and fat that carries flavor into the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the butter mixture so it can cling to the clams.
Egg yolks
Enrich and thicken the sauce as they gently heat, adding a creamy texture.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich sauce.

The step that matters

Heating the egg yolks with the mixture. Egg yolks thicken when heated gently but can scramble if they get too hot or are added to a very hot mixture too quickly. Tempering them slowly keeps the sauce smooth and creamy.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (clam, butter, flour, sauce, egg):

  1. Avocadofits about as well
  2. Lemonthe original
  3. Raisinfits about as well
  4. Coconutfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against clam, butter, flour, sauce, egg. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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