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Cream of Clam Soup

A creamy soup made with minced clams, milk, butter, flour, and seasonings, served 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 ½ cup of milk.

  2. Scald the mixture in a double boiler.

  3. Bind the soup with 2 tablespoons of butter and 1 tablespoon of flour.

  4. Cook for 5 minutes.

Season and serve

  1. Season with salt and pepper to taste.

  2. 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

Minced clams
Provide the main seafood flavour and texture of the soup.
Milk
Forms the creamy liquid base that carries the clam flavour.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a smooth mouthfeel.
Flour
Thickens the liquid as its starch swells when heated, giving the soup body.

The step that matters

Binding the soup with butter and flour. Flour thickens only when its starch is heated in liquid, so the butter and flour must be fully incorporated and the soup kept hot long enough for the starch to swell and thicken smoothly.

“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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