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Fried Clams

Fried clams are clams coated in meal and fried in fat.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Clam and beef work together. They rank in the top 20% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 58 recipes. Both carry 2,3-pentanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Fried Clams

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Remove the heads from the clams if desired.

  2. Wash the clams and pat them dry with a clean cloth.

  3. Place a handful of meal and a little coarse sea salt in a plate.

Fry

  1. Lightly roll the clams in the meal mixture.

  2. Fry the clams in beef fat, dripping, lard, or pork fat until golden brown.

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 + beeftop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together58 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-pentanedione (butter, sweet).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Flour + beeftop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together10,677 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and beef barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 10,677 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 protein and the flavor the dish is built around.
Meal (cornmeal or flour)
Forms a light coating that crisps and browns during frying.
Beef fat, dripping, lard, or pork fat
Conducts the heat for frying and gives browning and richness.

The step that matters

Pat the clams dry before rolling. Surface moisture makes the meal coating clump and steam instead of crisping, so the clams fry unevenly and lose their golden crust in hot fat.

“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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