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 ↓
Creamed Clams
Ingredients
Directions
Chop the clams finely.
Prepare a white sauce as you would for milk toast.
Add butter, coarse sea salt, and black pepper to the sauce.
Serve the mixture on toast.
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.
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Clam + buttertop 11% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together840 recipes
Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).
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Sauce + buttertop 15% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked together15,338 recipes
Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).
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Clam + saucetop 19% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked together117 recipes
Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).
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Butter + peppertop 21% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together85,593 recipes
Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).
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Clam + peppertop 25% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked together952 recipes
Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).
Sauce and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 15,338 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
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