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Cream of Clam Soup

A creamy soup made with clams, milk, butter, flour, salt, pepper, and topped with whipped cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Cream of Clam Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the soup

  1. Drain the liquor from the minced clams and add it to the milk.

  2. Scald the mixture in a double boiler.

  3. Bind the soup with butter and flour, cooking for 5 minutes.

  4. Season with salt and pepper to taste.

Serve

  1. Add the minced clams and serve immediately with a little whipped cream on each portion.

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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  2. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

Milk
Forms the liquid base of the soup and carries the clam flavour.
Butter
Enriches the soup with fat and adds a rich, mellow flavour.
Flour
Thickens the soup when cooked with butter, giving it a smooth body.
Minced clams
Provide the main seafood flavour and texture of the soup.

The step that matters

Binding the soup with butter and flour. Flour must be cooked with the butter and milk mixture long enough to thicken smoothly without lumps. Stirring and gentle heat keep the starch dispersed, so the soup becomes creamy rather than pasty or grainy.

“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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