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Clams on Toast

A quick dish of sautéed clams in butter and clam liquor served over toasted bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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 on Toast

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Chop the clams finely.

  2. In a saucepan, combine the butter and clam liquor.

Cook the clams

  1. Add the chopped clams and cook for 8 minutes, stirring continuously.

  2. Season with Tabasco sauce, salt, and black pepper.

  3. Bring the mixture to a boil.

Serve

  1. Pour the clam mixture over hot slices of toast.

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 + saucetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together15,338 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  3. Clam + saucetop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together117 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

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

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

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

Butter and sauce 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

What each ingredient does

Clams
Provide the main savory flavor and the bulk of the topping.
Butter
Adds richness and carries flavor through the sauce.
Clam liquor
Adds briny flavor and moisture that forms the saucy topping.

The step that matters

Bring the mixture to a boil. Boiling the clams too long toughens their texture and can make them rubbery. Keep the heat controlled once the clams are cooked through so they stay tender.

“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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