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Clams with Butter and Pepper

A dish of clams cooked with butter and pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 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 with Butter and Pepper

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the clams

  1. Cover your pot closely.

  2. Boil the clams for one hour.

Finish and serve

  1. Heat the clams with a little butter and pepper in a separate saucepan.

  2. Pour the clam mixture over the crust when ready to serve.

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 + peppertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  3. Clam + peppertop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together952 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Clams
Main ingredient that gives the dish its savory seafood flavor and tender texture.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a smooth, silky mouthfeel when the clams are reheated.
Pepper
Adds a sharp, aromatic bite that balances the sweetness of the clams.

The step that matters

Boil the clams for one hour. Prolonged high heat pushes clam proteins past tender and makes them tough and rubbery, so keep the pot covered and watch the cooking time closely.

“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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